Word: velma
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...goes. Once again, a capital case and a person's fate will be determined by a politician with a partisan agenda. In 1984 North Carolina Governor James Hunt was waging a fierce battle for the U.S. Senate seat held by Jesse Helms. Meanwhile, another political battle was raging. Velma Barfield, a matronly grandmother convicted of murdering her fiance while under the influence of drugs, was scheduled to be executed around election time. Barfield had won the sympathies of religious and political leaders all over the world because of the circumstances of the crime and her conduct as a prisoner. Despite...
Transplanted Americans can be unwitting victims of the roller-coaster Mexican economy. Velma Dempsey, who has lived in Chapala for 17 years, recalls visiting a bank in 1982 to transfer her life savings from the U.S. Perturbed by the slow-moving line, she went home, planning to return the next day. Overnight, the government expropriated all dollar savings, compensating depositors with pesos. Sighs Dempsey: "I was never so grateful for inefficiency...
...life here at Harvard--this bastion of Establishment liberalism--that in the days that followed, informed public opinion, as gauged by this amateur pulse-taker, swung decidedly in favor of the death penalty. "Kill the mother-fucker" was the gist of the reaction I got from friends and acquaintances. Velma Barfield's victims were one thing, but this...
...only one of three convicts put to death last week, and the 29th since the Supreme Court effectively reinstated the death penalty in 1976. But the case of Margie Velma Barfield, 52, was different, and not just because she was the first woman executed in the U.S. since...
...portly grandmother whose born-again piety has won over some of her toughest fellow inmates. She is also a convicted killer, sentenced to death row six years ago for killing her fiancé with arsenic. Margie Velma Barfield, 51, a onetime private nurse, also confessed to poisoning her mother and two elderly patients in her care. When North Carolina's Democratic Governor James Hunt, who is challenging conservative Republican Jesse Helms for his Senate seat, rejected Barfield's plea for clemency last week, his decision added emotionally charged elements to an already close, tense race...