The Last Word
GAILLARD, FRYE
THE LAST WORD Frye Gaillard An Untimely Life We feel mournful not only for Velma and her family, but because of what the state of North Carolina has decided to do. No one is saying this is a...
...When their pleas were rejected, supporters of Barfield carried the psychiatric evaluations to court, arguing that the evidence warranted a new trial...
...It was a triumph of procedure at the cost of a human life, and the tragedy is that it happens all the time...
...He was given to paranoid accusations about his wife's fidelity...
...Hunt ran on his record of decency, contrasting his racial tolerance, progressive stands on education, and opposition to cuts in social spending with the nasty and mean-spirited agenda of Helms...
...Such evidence, the judges said, should have been introduced much earlier, back in 1978 when the case first went to trial...
...They are simply saying it is time to kill someone...
...There is no question in my mind," wrote Lewis, "that Mrs...
...There, with proper medical treatment, she had become, from all accounts, a deeply religious and responsible person...
...As an adult, Barfield often bounced back and forth between moods of depression—so severe that she refused to get out of bed for days at a time—and manic periods that often ended in rage...
...No one is saying this is a frivolous issue we were raising in court...
...But four days before the election, in an astonishing lapse of everything he stands for, Hunt permitted the execution of Velma Barfield, a fifty-two-year-old grandmother who admitted poisoning to death at least four persons...
...Senate...
...Lewis provided...
...11 Violent mood swings of the kind displayed by members of Barfield's family can be hereditary, and both Velma and her siblings have shown serious symptoms...
...But by then, says Ingle, it is usually too late...
...Politically, it would have been hard for Hunt to do otherwise...
...Barfield had no control over her behaviors while in her manic state, and that had she not been maintained on antidepressant medication during manic states, she probably would not have acted in a psychotic and dangerous fashion...
...That was the compelling evidence before Jim Hunt, and he simply ignored it—even when death penalty opponents explained rather urgently that they were not suggesting that the Governor pardon Velma Barfield or turn her loose, but merely that he allow her to live out her days in prison...
...Her mother was given to depression and was treated for psychiatric illness by the family doctor...
...But again they were rebuffed, at both the state and Federal levels—not because Lewis's evaluation of Barfield was held to be flawed or irrelevant, but because it was untimely...
...A few weeks before the execution, they presented him with a detailed psychological evaluation of Velma Barfield, prepared last summer by Dorothy Otnow Lewis, a professor of psychiatry at New York University and the Bellevue Medical Center...
...In six hours of difficult interviews with a reluctant subject, Lewis was able to piece together a psychiatric profile that included the following elements: H Barfield had a family history of mental illness...
...How did he feel at the time, and how is he feeling today, several weeks later, as he grapples with his defeat and his peculiar act of cowardice...
...But the Barfield case raised such important issues, offered such a classic study in the imperfections of justice and the politics of death, that a man as moral as Jim Hunt could hardly have missed the point: Four days before an election is no time to decide the fate of another human being...
...Velma Barfield would never have been sentenced to death," concluded Joe Ingle, who heads the Southern Coalition on Jails and Prisons, "if, in the early stages of her trial, she had had the resources and the legal representation to obtain the kind of psychiatric evaluation that Dr...
...still another sexually molested her...
...Another relative stabbed the youthful Barfield and forced her to have sexual relations...
...Frye Gaillard, an editorial writer and columnist for The Charlotte Observer, wrote "The New South Rises Again" in the July 1984 issue of The Progressive...
...Jim Hunt was a defeated man before the ballots were counted...
...Joe Ingle, United Church of Christ minister, on the November execution of Velma Barfield You have to wonder about Jim Hunt...
...And he sexually abused Velma when she was a child...
...Good God...
...LARRY CARROLL The evaluation made a strong case that Barfield was insane at the time she committed murder...
...On numerous occasions, Barfield's father savagely beat his wife, his children, even his dogs...
...On November 6, Hunt, the Governor of North Carolina, lost a tough and bitter campaign to replace Jesse Helms in the U.S...
...A faulty diagnosis of her condition had resulted in the wrong treatment, Lewis found, making it almost inevitable that she would become psychotic...
...North Carolinians, like most Americans, overwhelmingly support the death penalty, and despite the righteous pleadings of a number of prominent people, including Ruth Graham, the wife of evangelist Billy Graham, they were not at all squeamish about putting a woman to death...
...Velma Barfield's case proves the point, and it contains an added bitter irony: A life was taken for an election that was lost...
...Her uncle was hospitalized for mental illness, and her father was "an extremely violent man who terrorized the entire household...
...H Barfield was treated for her depression, but apparently continued to take antidepressant drugs during her manic stages...
...That's the way it is in too many death penalty cases: The legal representation improves as the defendant gets closer to death...
...If Hunt needed evidence to support that conclusion, death penalty opponents provided plenty...
Vol. 49 • January 1985 • No. 1
