Word: farrows
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...recent competency hearing, the court stenographer had to stop several times to compose herself. But guilt or innocence is not in dispute here. Nobody argues that Bobby Shaw did not kill Calvin Morris. No one suggests that he did not then fatally stab prison guard Walter Farrow while doing time. For many who have followed the case, anger rises from the story of his journey through America's justice and social-welfare system. For Bobby Shaw has never been able to raise the defense of insanity, even though he has probably been brain- damaged or schizophrenic most of his life...
...previous record in jail and his history of sudden, violent behavior, prison officials assigned Bobby Shaw to the vegetable-cutting room, where inmates work with knives every day. He was neither examined nor treated for psychiatric illness. There Shaw was put under the direction of guard Walter Farrow, 61, who seemed to get along well with his prisoner. Bobby Shaw remembers his assignment with some excitement. "I was peelin' potatoes. I was runnin' the machine, makin' French fries, scalloped potatoes. Corn had to be snatched off the cob. Lettuce and cabbage had to be cut." He remembers nothing else...
...Shaw was found standing naked at his cell door at 1:37 p.m. when he was supposed to report for work. He got into fights with other inmates. In early 1978 he alarmed his fellow kitchen employees by attacking a sack of potatoes with a cutting knife. Farrow and others asked for Bobby to be transferred to a less dangerous...
...JULY 16, 1978, FARROW BEgan his day as usual, unlocking the cabinet containing the knives. Without warning, Bobby reached past him, grabbing two knives. "No, Shaw, no!" Farrow yelled. Bobby Shaw stabbed him in the chest and ran into the hallway. Farrow chased him, then collapsed and died. Shaw was subdued and badly beaten. "I saw him the next day in the hospital ward," says Ruby. "His head was so big. It was twice the size of a normal head, like a watermelon." Only last December did Shaw offer a version of what happened. It was the voices...
Janet Halderman is Walter Farrow's daughter. Her family was devastated by his murder. "It took me 18 months after my dad died to get up my confidence to walk into a dark room," she says. She believes that Bobby Shaw is a victim of society but that the execution has to be carried out. "Somewhere the system has made a mistake," she says. "If Mr. Shaw was in prison, the system should have known that he was mentally ill. If he was so mentally ill, he shouldn't have been allowed to work in a vegetable-cutting room with...