Amazon.com: Death Sentence: The True Story of Velma Barfield's Life, Crimes, and Execution: Jerry Bledsoe: Books

Amazon.com
In 1984, Velma Barfield became the first woman since 1962 to be executed in the United States. Her crimes were unusual: Barfield was convicted of the 1978 arsenic poisoning of her fiancé, Stuart Taylor, and she admitted killing three other people with poison, including her own mother. But her path to execution was circuitous, involving appeal after appeal to various high courts, a grassroots movement to prevent her death, a jailhouse spiritual epiphany, and subsequent "recollections" of childhood abuse and torment that she claimed eventually led to her abuse of prescription tranquilizers, which in turn clouded her judgment and enabled her to perform murderous crimes. Death Sentence, however, is as much about the people she left behind as it is about her fate.

Jerry Bledsoe chooses Barfield's son, Ronnie Burke, as his protagonist. Burke is a greatly sympathetic character whose sense of horror and shame leaps from the pages. Burke watches his own life fall apart as his mother undergoes a transformation in prison, while he uses every last ounce of his strength to try to save her life. He feels duty bound to help her, but nearing the end of the appeals process, he begs her to just quit and accept her ultimate penalty. Yet at her funeral, divorced and in the beginning stages of alcoholism, he cries and begs her forgiveness, apologizing for not doing more to save her. Openly critical of the death penalty, Bledsoe focuses a surgically precise camera on the process of state-sponsored execution and its effects, and the result is a grim but gripping and suspenseful tale. --Tjames Madison

From Publishers Weekly
In 1978, 52-year-old grandmother Velma Barfield admitted to poisoning four people, including her own mother. While she would be convicted of only one murder?that of her fiance, Stuart Taylor?it would be enough for her to die by lethal injection in 1984, the first woman to be executed in the U.S. after the reinstatement of capital punishment in 1974. Relying mostly on anecdotes from Barfield's two children, veteran true-crime writer Bledsoe (Before He Wakes; Blood Games) glides smoothly through Barfield's history, from a brief look into her own poor, brutalized childhood through the love and stability she provided for her own young children and finally to her decline into the prescription-drug addiction, which Barfield's lawyer would argue compromised her judgment and her responsibility. Bledsoe's account of the trial itself, particularly of the courtroom antics of district attorney Joe Freeman Britt ("the world's deadliest prosecutor"), is so vivid that it is hard to believe he was not there. Likewise, the tortured ambivalence of Barfield's son Ronnie for a mother whose drug problems destroyed his life, but whom he still remembers as his class mom, adds a depth of feeling that is often difficult to capture in true-crime literature. It is only when Barfield becomes a born-again Christian that Bledsoe's narrative gets a bit heavy-handed; although he tries to balance the testimonials to Barfield's newfound faith with interviews with the victims' families, the former far outnumber the latter. But ultimately, for Bledsoe, Barfield's story seems to be a cautionary tale that discredits the death penalty because it offers no possibility of redemption, no second chances.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Death Sentence: The True Story of Velma Barfield's Life, Crimes, and Execution (Hardcover)

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought