Death Sentence (22 page)

Not until October would North Carolina’s Central Prison reopen its death row, however. The first person to occupy it under the new law was James C. Jones, age thirty-six. Jones had been on pass after being returned to prison for a parole violation on an armed robbery charge when he shot Jimmy Locklear, age sixty-eight, in the back, killing him. The shooting took place in Pembroke in Robeson County, and Jones, of course, was sent to death row by none other than Joe Freeman Britt.

Britt would not have another first-degree murder trial for more than a year, and if the study undertaken by Pembroke University political scientist and criminologist Frank Schmalleger was any indication, he would be having fewer and fewer. The study, published in the October 1978 issue of
Carolina Politics,
showed that the murder rate in Robeson County had plummeted dramatically in Britt’s first two years in office while it had climbed in adjoining Cumberland County, in another judicial district. The conclusion was that the certainty of facing a death penalty was deterring murder in Robeson County.

But at least one murder had not been reported in that study because nobody had known about it: that of Velma Barfield’s mother, Lillie. Britt’s “blitz” hadn’t deterred Velma from killing then or later. Now she would be facing Britt, who still hadn’t failed to win a death penalty in twenty-two trials. But this case might well be the one to break his string. He had never tried a woman for her life, and he knew that jurors weren’t just reluctant to sentence women to death, they almost never did.

Velma Barfield, Britt knew, would be his greatest challenge.

12

The Bladen County courthouse was thirteen years old, a two-story red-brick structure with a wide lawn facing Broad Street on a bluff above the Cape Fear River in Elizabethtown. It was here that Joe Freeman Britt brought Velma to trial eight and a half months after her arrest. A special court session had been ordered, and 150 citizens had been summoned as potential jurors.

Four weeks earlier, Judge Henry McKinnon moved the trial from Scotland County because the docket there was overburdened. Bladen County adjoined Robeson County on the east, and Elizabethtown was twenty-five miles from Lumberton.

The courtroom on the second floor was huge, with walls of robin’s egg blue, wainscoted with lustrous cherry. Bands of morning sun streamed through tall, narrow windows that faced the courthouse lawn. The area behind the bar was immense, as big as a stage, appropriate for the spectacle that was about to open. The fourteen rows of dark wooden pews were jammed with people called for jury duty when the trial opened on Monday morning, November 27, 1978.

Joanna, Pam and Kirby sat in the first row behind the bar, on the same side as the defense table where Ronnie sat with Bob Jacobson. Family members of Velma’s victims occupied the first two rows on the opposite side of the aisle.

Velma was led into the courtroom by bailiffs from a side door. She looked tired, haggard, ill at ease. Dark circles framed her eyes. Her skin was pallid and pasty, her makeup too heavy, her hair stiff with spray. She’d had no appropriate clothes for court, and Pam’s in-laws had borrowed several outfits from a woman in their church who was about Velma’s size. For opening day she wore a blue skirt with a blue jacket and a white blouse.

Remarkably, few reporters were in the audience, and those present were only from area newspapers, radio and TV stations. Velma’s trial wouldn’t get the sensational national attention that a serial-killer grandmother might be expected to receive. In part, this was due to Robeson County’s isolation—and the even greater isolation of the trial site in rural and heavily forested Bladen County. Perhaps in larger part it was because Velma, despite her admission to killing four people, was charged with only a single murder, that of Stuart Taylor.

The reason was simple. Stuart was the only person she had killed after the enactment of the new death penalty statute. John Henry Lee had died just three days after the law had gone into effect, but the criminal act, the administering of the poison, had first taken place more than a month earlier, and the state had no evidence that Velma had given him poison after June 1.

If Britt failed to win a death sentence in this case, he could try Velma for the other murders one by one, winning life sentences in each and preventing her from ever being paroled.

Ronnie and Pam had already accepted that their mother would spend the rest of her life in prison. Bob Jacobson had told them as much at their first meeting in the spring. His best hope was to save her life. And in that, he knew, the odds were with him.

Jacobson was as much aware as Britt that women rarely received the death penalty. He knew that Velma also had another powerful advantage: she was a grandmother. Sending a grandmother to the gas chamber was practically unheard of, no matter her crimes.

Pam trusted in that. But Ronnie tried to view the situation realistically, and he was dubious about his mother’s chances. On one side, as he saw it, were the power and resources of the state and “the world’s deadliest prosecutor.” On the other was his obviously addled mother with no resources other than the assistance of a soft-spoken young lawyer who had never handled a capital case and was far less experienced and dynamic than his adversary. Despite his respect for Jacobson, Ronnie realized that the matchup was less than even.

Like Britt, Jacobson had had no particular desire to be a lawyer. He had grown up an Air Force brat, the eldest of four sons of a bomber pilot. His high school years had been spent in California and Kansas.

His father had been a native of Iowa and still owned a family farm there, so Jacobson attended the University of Iowa, a political science major, an ROTC student. Following his graduation in 1964, his military obligation awaited, and with it the near certainty of being sent to Vietnam. He chose law school to postpone it.

With his law degree in hand, he became a first lieutenant in the Air Force and was sent not to Vietnam but to North Carolina, to the Judge Advocate General’s office at Pope Air Force Base adjoining Fort Bragg, where at the officers club he made the acquaintance of a couple of lawyers from Robeson County who were military reservists. One was Joe Freeman Britt. The other was John Campbell, a past president of the state bar association. Through Campbell he met Judge Henry McKinnon, who like Britt was a native of Robeson County and the son of a lawyer. A World War II combat veteran and graduate of the Duke University Law School, McKinnon had been on the bench since 1958.

Campbell offered Jacobson a job in Lumberton when he was released from the Air Force in 1971, but Jacobson already had a position lined up with the Iowa attorney general’s office, where for the next two years he represented the state on criminal appeals before the Iowa Supreme Court. But the winters were bitter in Iowa, and when John Campbell called with another offer in 1973, Jacobson took it. He had been licensed to practice in North Carolina for just under four years when he was assigned to represent Velma.

Now, as court was called to order and Jacobson’s friend Henry McKinnon, fifty-six years old, tall and angular with kind eyes and a thin, patrician face, took the bench, Jacobson’s mind was concentrated on one thing: picking a jury that would be sympathetic enough to allow Velma to live out her days in prison.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this is a special session of Superior Court for the trial of criminal cases,” McKinnon intoned, “and the case that is expected to be begun at this time is a case in which Margie Velma Bullard Barfield is charged with first-degree murder, it being alleged that she killed one Stuart Taylor under such circumstances as to constitute first-degree murder about January 31, 1978.”

He moved quickly to picking the jury. Earlier, in chambers, Jacobson had requested that the jury pool be sequestered during selection and McKinnon had granted the request, ruling that candidates for the jury would be questioned in groups of twelve. Now the courtroom largely emptied as all but the first twelve potential jurors called to the box departed.

Joe Freeman Britt didn’t hold with modern, so-called scientific methods of jury selection. “Courtroom voodoo,” he called them. Law schools taught to look for affluent, educated people. Not Britt. Such people had been exposed to too many specious sociological and psychological theories, he thought, were too easily swayed by sad stories, carried too much secret guilt about their advantages.

“I like my jurors to be kicked around a little bit,” he later would say. “I want a guy who drives an old car, not one who reads psychology books. That way, when some fast-talking defense attorney starts telling how his poor client was beaten by his daddy as a child and how that makes him not responsible for what he’s done, my juror’s going to think, ‘Shoot, my daddy beat me, too, and I never killed nobody.’”

Britt even looked for jurors who’d had brushes with the law. “I just happen to like tattooed jurors,” he would tell reporter Dee Reid, only half joking. “They know why he did it. He’s just mean as hell, that’s why.”

In this jury pool, all of them rural and small-town people, many wearing work clothes, Britt had no doubt that he could quickly assemble a panel that suited him.

Britt wasted no time getting to the crucial question with each juror. How do you feel about the death penalty?

“I am opposed to it,” said the first person he asked, a woman.

“Is your opposition such that you could not vote to impose the death penalty regardless of the evidence and circumstances?” Britt asked. “Is that what you are saying?”

“Yes, sir.”

She was excused, and the next juror was more to Britt’s liking, a truck driver who said he thought the death penalty was necessary in some cases. Another, a construction worker, was even more Britt’s kind of juror. “I believe I feel for it,” he responded.

A farmer who followed thought the law necessary but said he’d have to have proof “beyond a shadow of a doubt.”

What about beyond reasonable doubt? Britt asked.

“I would have to know they deserved it. Couldn’t say without hearing the case.”

“Well, assume…” Britt said and went into a litany of assumptions.

“That’s a lot of assuming,” said the farmer, drawing chuckles from the courtroom.

It went on like that, but by day’s end, ten jurors had been chosen. Before the lunch recess on Tuesday, the second day of the trial, the panel was complete, seven men, five women, nine white, three black. The two alternates were white, one male, one female. The members included a former waitress, a retired Navy flight engineer, a timber buyer, a secretary, a factory worker, a forest service employee, even a member of the National Guard who had been in classes taught by Joe Freeman Britt.

Every person on the panel had agreed that he or she could vote for the death penalty. All who had expressed opposition to capital punishment had been excused. This was, in modern legal parlance, “a death-qualified jury.”

Conventional wisdom among lawyers was that the opening statement was one of the most important aspects of a trial. Britt didn’t hold with that. He didn’t see the point of telegraphing his intentions to the opposition, for one thing. Keep them guessing. But mainly he didn’t want to waste his story, didn’t want to roll it into a tight little summary, squeezing out its vital juices. He wanted it to unfold full-bore, with all its shocking horror. As usual, he declined to make opening remarks, and Jacobson followed his example.

After lunch, Britt began his story by calling Billy Taylor, who described his father’s condition on his first visit to the emergency room.

“Occasionally he would groan or complain and he would try to sit up and he would sit up for a short period and then he would try to lie down and he would fall down. He couldn’t stop moving. He would hold his stomach and he was just continually moving.”

Jacobson, on cross-examination, made certain the jurors knew that Velma had brought Stuart to the hospital.

“Did she seem concerned about his condition?” he asked.

“At that time, yes.”

The next witness, Leland Jones, an emergency room physician, told of his examination of Stuart on his first visit. “I felt he had gastritis. He had admitted to drinking but not recently, and he was very dehydrated.”

Stuart didn’t vomit in the emergency room, Jones said. “He had writhing movements.”

“Beg your pardon?” said Britt, seeing a chance to emphasize his victim’s agonies.

“Writhing.”

“Writhing around?”

“Yes.”

How many poison cases had he seen in his work? Jacobson asked.

“Well, probably over a hundred.”

“This did not appear to you to be that type of case?” The symptoms were quite common, said the doctor. “There was nothing that would tip you off to anything unusual.”

“Are you familiar with the drug Valium?” Jacobson asked.

“Yes.”

“What is it used for?”

“Well, it is used for sedation and tranquilization and a number of other things.”

Jacobson went on to ask about a long list of drugs that Velma had taken over the years. He would repeat this with every doctor who took the stand. He wanted to plant drugs in the minds of jurors early as the source of Velma’s problems, and before they reached any decisions he wanted them to be thoroughly familiar with the names and effects of all that she had taken.