Description:
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
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