Death Sentence (46 page)

Carter had no time to talk with her. The caravan was ready to roll. Raleigh police cars with blue lights flashing rushed ahead to block intersections so the caravan could pass unimpeded. The whole thing seemed surreal and unnecessary to Carter. Did the department think some ACLU commando squad might be lurking in the darkness to try to snatch Velma from their grasp?

Central Prison sprawled over twenty-two acres on the southeastern edge of downtown Raleigh. Hulking behind multiple rows of razor-wire-topped fences in a valley by Walnut Creek, the prison was squat—just four levels high—with numerous wings, each secured from the others. Just two years old, modem and utilitarian in design, its facade was of beige-pebbled precast concrete. At night, the prison was brilliantly illuminated, none of its many odd angles escaping the light, so that the guards in the watchtowers could see every nook and cranny.

The caravan arrived shortly before ten, four days and four hours before Velma’s scheduled execution. While Velma was being processed, Carter and Jennie Lancaster went to the administrative offices to meet with Warden Nathan Rice.

Forty-four years old, Rice had started at the prison as a guard in 1961 and had risen through the ranks to the top job just two and a half years earlier. In his twenty-three years on the job, Rice had survived a 1968 riot in which six inmates had been killed and eighty guards and inmates injured, had served as chief negotiator when three inmates had taken six staff members and two inmates hostage. But nothing, he later would say, had been as difficult for him as being responsible for executions.

“When you see that person lying on the gurney and knowing you have to give the word, there are very few things in life that give that amount of stress,” he told a reporter. “That is not a political statement, it is fact.”

His first execution had been made no easier because James Hutchins had been a difficult prisoner, angry to the end, who had told Rice shortly beforehand, “I hope I see you in hell when this is over.” But the execution now facing him promised to be even more difficult. Velma was a woman beloved by many, a woman supposedly redeemed, a Christian supported by Billy and Ruth Graham, a woman who already had forgiven him for the role he might soon be playing. And nobody had to tell him that much of the world would be watching when he did it.

When Velma arrived in the deathwatch area, she was not the stunned, frightened and dejected creature she had been when she had first been brought there four and a half months earlier. She joked with the female guards who had been brought from a prison hospital in Hoke County to oversee her. She knew them. They were the same guards who had attended her when she had been on deathwatch in June. Carol Oliver was the captain of the guard. She had met Velma several years earlier at Women’s Prison, and she came to her cell to greet her. Velma seemed pleased to see her. It was after her bedtime, she told Oliver with a laugh. All of this commotion was disrupting her sleep.

This time Velma was assigned Cell B, next to the one she had occupied previously. She had been there a few minutes when Rice arrived, all business, with Lancaster and Carter to tell her what to expect, just as he had done in June. After he departed, Lancaster and Carter stayed to make sure that she was okay. Velma urged them to go on home; they had done enough for her already.

As soon as they left, Velma sent out to the canteen for a Coke, a Milky Way and a pack of Salems (the cigarettes were for dignity; she smoked one only when she used the toilet to mask any odor that might offend her keepers). Guards also brought to her cell the toilet items, nightclothes and Bible she had been allowed to bring with her. Her other personal belongings—her books, a borrowed tape player, tapes, cosmetics, hair rollers and brush—had not yet been sent from Women’s Prison, and she was worried about them. Jimmie Little was supposed to come in the morning and she was not about to let him see her without makeup, her hair in a mess.

Velma finally got to bed after nurses brought medicines for her stomach and angina near eleven-thirty. Before midnight she was fast asleep.

She woke early, coughing, on her fifty-second birthday, Monday, October 29, her execution now less than four days away.

“Is it about six-thirty?” she called to a guard.

“Six-o-six,” the guard replied.

On Friday, Jimmie Little had granted a final TV interview with Velma to ABC News, hoping to counter the less-than-helpful report on
60 Minutes
two weeks earlier, and it was scheduled to appear on
Good Morning America
this day. Velma wanted to watch it. A small TV had been brought into the day room and placed on a shelf by the glass-enclosed control room. Velma could see it from her cell. She told the guard stationed just outside her cell that she’d like to have the TV turned on shortly before seven.

“If I go back to sleep, call me,” she said.

“She appears to be in good spirits,” the guard in the control room wrote in the log.

Velma didn’t go back to sleep because a nurse soon arrived with her medicines. She got up then and sat on her bunk, legs folded beneath her, reading her Bible.

One of the guards turned on the TV just as a new shift was arriving. The report about Velma did not appear until twelve minutes into the show. She stood at the narrow window of her cell door, intently watching herself telling the interviewer, “My attorneys have some issues they will be filing Monday. It would give a stay and hopefully the courts will look at the issues.”

Anybody watching could see that Velma did not appear to be a woman who thought that she would die this week.

“I have hope in what my attorneys will be filing,” she was saying. “I feel that we should cling to hope.”

In Goose Creek, Ronnie was watching with no hope at all, still convinced that his mother was fooling herself. The interview had been taped before he had learned that she intended to go ahead with the new appeals.

He had been deeply depressed since he yelled at her and stormed away from the prison Saturday. On the way back to South Carolina, he hadn’t been able to escape the feeling that he had betrayed his mother. How many times had he promised that he would always be there for her, that he would stand by her to the end, no matter what? And yet at this great moment of her need, he had cursed her, turned his back and abandoned her because of his own pain and weakness.

His guilt and despair had been so great as he drove back home that the thought crossed his mind that he could end it with a simple turn of the wheel into the face of an oncoming tractor-trailer. Yet something prevented him from following that grisly impulse.

On Sunday, Jimmie Little called. “I was very firm with him,” Little later remembered. “I said, ‘This isn’t about you. This is about your mother. As awful as it is, you’re just going to have to deal with the consequences. She had to make her own decision. If this doesn’t work, she’s going to need you here.’”

Ronnie knew that he was right. He apologized for his outburst. Later, his mother called.

“Are you still mad?” she asked.

“It’s not anger at you, Mama,” he said. “It’s just the process, the system.”

“I can see now the hurt you’ve been holding back,” she told him. “I know what I’ve put y’all through. If I could do anything to change it I would.”

“I know that.”

She wanted to live, Velma went on to explain, and if there was a chance, she had to take it, as much for her attorneys’ sake as for her own. Jimmie and Dick had worked so hard for so long with never a cent of pay, putting out their own money for expenses. She could not deny them one last attempt to save her. She could not let them go through the rest of their lives thinking that if they had done one more thing they might have won, she might have lived.

“I understand,” Ronnie said. He felt bad about his own anger toward them, the sharp things he had said.

“Ronnie, you will come back, won’t you?”

“Mama, if it looks like it’s going to happen, you know I’ll be there.”

The weekend had proved frenetic for Little and Burr. Researching, plotting, writing motions, making scores of telephone calls, gathering documents, talking with Velma, dealing with her family problems. Mary Ann Tally had come to help as had four other young lawyers. They had worked relentlessly through the weekend in Little’s small apartment, taking breaks only to eat and catch a couple of hours’ sleep.

By Monday morning, they had completed a motion for appropriate relief that was fifty-five pages long, backed by a thick sheaf of documents, including the psychiatric report by Dr. Dorothy Lewis.

To start the appeals again, Burr and Little had to raise new issues that could not have been known to them when they had filed their original motion more than four years earlier. They cited six. Three had been raised before, but new questions about them had since developed.

Their strongest issue was that Velma had been incompetent to stand trial because of withdrawal from Valium addiction and underlying mental disorders that had only been diagnosed in recent months. Valium addiction was not even known to the medical establishment at the time of the trial, they noted, and was just beginning to be recognized when they had filed their original motion.

Burr and Little also raised the issue of Joe Freeman Britt’s final argument to the jury, claiming it had been inflammatory and prejudicial, making it impossible for the jurors to consider Velma as an individual. Both prepared affidavits saying that they had not raised the issue earlier because they thought they could only do so if Britt’s argument had been so egregious that it dominated the whole proceedings. At the time, they had known of no legal theory on which the issue could be based, but a Supreme Court ruling in a 1983 case now made it possible.

When Jimmie Little visited that morning, Velma thought he looked exhausted, and she was concerned about him (in fact, he was in serious pain from kidney stones, but he didn’t let her know). The motions for a stay and for a new hearing had been filed an hour earlier with the Superior Court in Robeson County, he told her.

The judge holding court there this week, B. Craig Ellis, had not previously dealt with the case. He had only been on the bench since January, appointed by Governor Hunt, and was facing election for the first time in the coming week. There was no way to know how he might react.

With the execution now less than four days away, the judge probably would move swiftly. If he decided not to grant the stay, they already were preparing documents to take straight to the state Supreme Court. If that failed, they would move on to Judge Dupree in Federal District Court, then back to the Fourth Circuit again. After that, they would have one last shot at the U.S. Supreme Court. Somewhere along the way, they might get a stay.

Little was still concerned that Velma not raise her hopes so high that she deny the reality of two a.m. Friday. She assured him that she was prepared, no matter which way it went.

After Little left, the Roanes arrived and set up their portable, battery-powered organ in one of the tiny, cramped visitor cubicles. Soon Gales Roane’s exuberant play and Sam’s thunderous bass voice echoed through the visiting area while Velma, separated from them by thick glass, sang along happily.

Velma returned to her cell for lunch before going off for another visit, this time with Lao Rupert of the North Carolina Coalition on Prisons and Jails, who had been coming to see her regularly since her arrival in prison nearly six years earlier.

After that visit, Velma took a brief nap, then turned to her mail. Several packets of cards, letters and telegrams had arrived so far this day, mostly from strangers, and the quantity would grow greatly as the week wore on.

Shortly before four, Skip Pike entered the deathwatch area. This was the third time he’d dropped by this day. He’d come early in the morning to find out when Velma would have time to talk with him—maybe in late afternoon, she’d told him—and he’d returned again, grinning, just as she was leaving to see the Roanes before noon. That time he had brought a birthday card signed by all the men on death row.

Pike was thirty-six, a wiry, energetic, talkative man who had given his life to God, the imprisoned and condemned. In July, he had transferred to the chaplain staff at Central, by far the state’s largest prison. Just a few weeks earlier, when the chaplain had retired, Pike had been appointed to his position. In his four months at Central, he had taken a special interest in the men on death row, getting to know each individually. But he had not faced an execution, and he was nervous and anxious now that Velma’s was only days away.

Pike was a close friend of Phil Carter and Jennie Lancaster and had had many conversations with them about Velma. But he had not met her until a couple of weeks earlier, when he had gone to Women’s Prison so that Carter could introduce them.

“We just had the very best time,” he recalled later. “She was so open. There wasn’t anything I asked that she wasn’t more than willing to go into. I had never encountered a human being living under the sentence of death who had so much grace and compassion for all people. It didn’t matter if it was the prosecutor, the people at the attorney general’s office, the judges or the people who were so adamantly in favor of her being executed, she showed the same understanding and love for them all.”

Now Pike sat chatting with Velma on the bunk in her tiny, grim cell, only eighty-two hours from her scheduled execution, and he was astounded that he still saw no anxiety, no fear, no bitterness, no apparent concern for herself. While he was there, her canteen order arrived: two Cokes, bags of potato chips, Fritos, Cheez Doodles, two Snickers bars.