Death Sentence (36 page)

They began talking about separating, and Ronnie decided that he needed to get away for a while, to clear his system of drugs, to try to come up with some solutions. He called his aunt Arlene, who was still living in Charleston, and she invited him for a visit. He packed the car and was about to say good-bye when Michael started crying.

Soon all of them were crying, and Ronnie and Joanna began talking about working on their marriage again, trying to save it for Michael’s sake. Ronnie called Arlene to say he wasn’t coming. And as he unpacked the car he resolved that he would stop taking drugs completely. He took none that night and felt good about his willpower. But he didn’t sleep well, and the next day he felt terrible. His head hurt, and he was nervous and scared, overcome with feelings unlike any he’d ever known.

A day later, he collapsed, unconscious. Joanna called an ambulance, and he was taken to the emergency room at the Laurinburg hospital, where he was revived.

He told the doctor about the drugs he had been taking and how he had stopped two days earlier. “What you did was very dangerous,” the doctor told him, going on to say that the body adjusted to the level of drugs it was receiving and that stopping cold could create problems severe enough to kill. He could need help coming off the drugs, the doctor said, and suggested that he talk with his own doctor to create a plan.

Ronnie thought he had been through the worst of it. He went home to rest after being released from the emergency room. But he began feeling worse, and Joanna called a friend who was a nurse. She recommended that Ronnie admit himself to the mental health center at Southeastern Hospital in Lumberton, where a close watch could be kept on him while he underwent withdrawal.

Ronnie signed himself in later that day, was given vitamins and a shot that knocked him out for the night.

The irony of his situation overwhelmed him when he awoke the next morning. How many times had he been to this place to visit his mother? How many times had he condemned her weaknesses for putting her here? And now he was a patient himself. He couldn’t believe how easily he had fallen into her patterns. The irony was only reinforced when he met later that day with Dr. Malcolm Kemp, who had treated his mother after she overdosed in 1972.

“Why shouldn’t we be having this conversation?” Dr. Kemp asked. “Can you think of a reason why you shouldn’t be here?”

Ronnie nodded. “I know what my mom’s been through, and now I’ve ended up the same way,” he said.

“That’s the way I see it,” the doctor agreed. “I’m glad you do, too.”

Ronnie checked himself out of the hospital after three days. He was feeling much better, and he wanted to get back home and back to work. Joanna was upset that he didn’t stay longer, but he was determined to quit drugs and do something to relieve the stress in his life.

He would beat the drugs with nothing more than vitamins, aspirin and determination, although it wasn’t easy. “I could feel the drugs coming out of my system,” he later recalled. “I could literally smell it.”

Soon after leaving the hospital, he quit teaching, cut back on his part-time work, and left his job for a less stressful position as an accountant at a plant in St. Pauls. But other troubles were soon to come. Joanna lost her job and they had to sell their house and get a bill-consolidation loan. They moved into an apartment and started over again.

Velma learned nothing of any of this, however, because Ronnie didn’t want her worrying about his problems.

All during this dark year, the appeals process kept grinding onward. The state Supreme Court upheld Judge Braswell’s findings on July 9, and once again Velma faced another hearing and a new execution date. On July 23, she was taken to Whiteville, where she had nearly died from an overdose, to face Judge Braswell again. He set her execution for October 21, 1981.

That date was as meaningless as the others, for Little and Burr would now be going back to the U.S. Supreme Court. Little asked for another stay of execution on October 1, and it was granted eight days later.

The court took little time with this appeal, however, again declining to review her case. When Burr asked the court to reconsider, it declined again on December 7. Three days before Christmas, Velma was taken back to Elizabethtown to have yet another execution date set: March 22, 1982. That date was as meaningless as the others, for the appeals through the federal courts had not even begun.

To file an appeal in federal court, Velma’s lawyers had to show violations of her constitutional rights during her trial and subsequent hearing. On March 12, 1982, Little and Burr took Velma’s case to U.S. District Court Judge Franklin Dupree in Raleigh, claiming several such violations. Their motion came with more than 2,000 pages of court documents. Dupree, as expected, granted another stay until he could review all the material.

Two weeks later, Dupree asked Burr and Little to provide a more extensive list of what they claimed to be errors in the 1980 hearing before Judge Braswell. Clearly, here was a judge who was going to look carefully at all the issues, and the lawyers were heartened that Velma might now be on her way to a reprieve. They were surprised when Dupree issued a thirty-six-page opinion two months later, May 21, ruling against them on every count.

“The evidence against her was overwhelming,” Dupree said. “She was convicted and sentenced in strict compliance with a constitutionally sound statutory scheme by twelve of her peers who unanimously concluded that, beyond a reasonable doubt, the death penalty should be imposed in this case.”

Dupree said that Judge McKinnon had not committed any constitutional violations by allowing the jury to hear about Velma’s previous crimes or by his instructions to the jury. Neither, Dupree ruled, did Velma receive ineffective counsel.

“The case which Mr. Jacobson was called upon to defend was an almost hopeless one from the beginning,” he wrote.

Velma was not surprised by the ruling. She had become accustomed to judicial rejection. But now the rejections were growing more serious. The appeals process was winding down. Only two more basic steps were left, a plea to the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, and a final plea to the U.S. Supreme Court, which had refused to consider Velma’s case four times already.

The reality of Velma’s situation was brought into sharper focus less than three weeks later when, on August 10, Virginia executed Frank J. Coppola, who had robbed and murdered a woman in Newport News in 1978. Coppola was only the fifth person to be executed in the country since the Supreme Court decision in 1976. Like all but one of the others who had been executed, Coppola had dropped his appeals and asked to be allowed to die. But his attorneys still had fought to the end to save him, and death-penalty opponents, including many from North Carolina, had made last-minute appeals to Governor Charles Robb asking for clemency.

The following day many North Carolina newspapers carried stories saying that Governor Jim Hunt might soon be facing the same situation in Velma’s case as had Robb in Coppola’s. The stories quoted Hunt’s press secretary, Gary Pearce, as saying that the governor supported the death penalty because he believed it to be a deterrent. He would not hesitate to allow it to be carried out if he thought the case warranted it, said Pearce— and that included executing a woman.

North Carolina’s death row had been growing steadily in the five years since the new death penalty had been enacted. Twenty-three people now faced execution, but Velma was the only woman among them, and her case was farthest along. Still, many people could not believe that Hunt would want the distinction of allowing the first woman to be executed in the nation in more than twenty years. He, after all, was a progressive Democrat who obviously had higher ambitions.

Shortly after Judge Dupree’s ruling, Velma received another setback that brought her far more sorrow. Hugh Hoyle arrived for their weekly session subdued, not his cheerful and effusive self. Velma knew immediately that something was wrong. He was reluctant to reveal what it was, but she had to know. He had accepted the pastorate of a much larger church in Wichita, Kansas. He would be leaving soon. Velma began to cry.

In the three years that Hoyle had been ministering to her, Velma had become closer to him than to anybody outside her family. He seemed like family. When he and his wife, Lois, adopted a son, Benjamin, in March, they got permission to bring him to see her, and she took the infant into her arms and cooed over him as if he were a grandchild.

Velma didn’t know what she would do without Hoyle to guide her spiritual growth, to inspire and cheer her when she was low, and she told him so. They would still write regularly, he assured her, still talk by telephone. They just wouldn’t get to see each other so often, although he would come whenever he returned to North Carolina to visit family.

Velma wanted only one promise from Hoyle. More than a year earlier, she had started talking with him about her funeral. Already she had picked hymns to be sung, scriptures to be read. Now she asked Hoyle to promise that he would return to conduct her service. Knowing that he would be there would mean everything to her, she said. If it was possible, he promised, he would be there.

Phil Carter had replaced John Frazier as chaplain at Women’s Prison. He had a special empathy for the inmates because he once had been one himself, having served a brief term in a youth center for a drunken misdeed as a teenager. He had redeemed himself by graduating from the University of North Carolina and working with deprived children before attending seminary and entering the ministry. A former member of a rock-and-roll band, Carter was an anomaly: a liberal Southern Baptist.

Carter had been serving an internship at Women’s Prison when Velma arrived, and he met her soon afterward. He rarely saw her during her first year there, but after he was named chaplain at age twenty-seven in December 1979, he began going by to see her regularly. He enjoyed talking with her. They rarely discussed religion, talking instead about whatever was on Velma’s mind, and they soon developed a closeness. After Hoyle left, Velma decided that Carter would be her spiritual guide as well as friend and confidant.

Ronnie’s marriage had lapsed back into anger and animosity by the fall of 1982, and the strain continued to grow. Joanna was like his mother in some ways, Ronnie would later say. Once she started, she would not let up. But unlike his father, who had never allowed himself to be provoked into violence, Ronnie had gone past that point.

On two occasions he had lost control and hit Joanna, once leaving her with a swollen eye, another time with a cut lip. Both times he had been ashamed and frightened of the fury within him and his inability to restrain it.

After she was struck the second time, Joanna rented a small apartment in another town and took Michael when she left. Although she and Ronnie talked about getting back together afterward, it was clear that their marriage was a shambles that couldn’t be made whole again, that trying to hold it together for the sake of their son was only doing him harm.

At the end of 1982, Ronnie quit his job and gave up his apartment. He could not afford to store his belongings, and he tossed his golfing trophies and college textbooks into a Dumpster, along with other items that had meant a lot to him. He was going to Charleston to stay for a while with his aunt Arlene and to try to start a new life, taking only some clothing and a small stereo.

Joanna kept their only car, and he had no means even to get to his sister’s apartment, where he was to meet his aunt. He had to call Joanna to ask for a ride, and the trip was a sad and silent one.

Michael didn’t understand what was happening, and when they got to this place where Ronnie and Joanna had lived when he was born, it was almost more than Ronnie could stand. Michael was six now, in the first grade, and Ronnie led him to the front stoop and sat with him in his lap to talk.

“I’m not going to be able to see you as much anymore,” he said. “I’ve got to go away. It may be for a long time. I want you to help look after your mama and promise me you’ll be a good boy.”

“I don’t want to be away from you, Daddy,” Michael said, tears coming to his eyes.

“I don’t want to be away from you either,” Ronnie said, holding back his own tears. “It’s just something that has to be. Someday maybe you’ll understand.”

Then he kissed his son on the forehead, hugged him tightly and carried him back to the car.

“I love you,” he told him, “and I’ll call and see how you’re doing.”

Joanna left hurriedly, Michael’s face pressed to the car window looking back, as Ronnie stood waving in the driveway, tears streaming. When the car disappeared from sight, Ronnie sank slowly to the pavement and sat sobbing quietly.

Ronnie knew that he probably couldn’t keep his mother from finding out about his separation, but he tried. In March 1983, she fell ill and had to be taken to the prison hospital, where she remained for eight days being treated for angina, the same condition that had plagued her father in his final years. Ronnie drove from Charleston to see her. He had not visited for many months, and had regained most of his lost weight by drinking high-calorie, vitamin-enriched supplements. He tried to put on a cheerful front.

“Where are Joanna and Michael?” Velma asked after he hugged her.

“Oh, they couldn’t come today.”

“Ronnie, something’s wrong, isn’t it?” she said, catching him off guard.

“No, why?” he insisted.

“I can tell just by looking at you. What’s wrong?”