Reason First: Monster Matriarch- The Death Row Granny

Roach, ant poison, and iced tea don’t make for the best cocktail. Yet Velma Margi Barfield thought this would be the perfect drink for her fiancé to imbibe. For her actions, she would become the first woman to die by lethal injection. But not before advocates argued her sentence be commuted because Barfield had recently become a born-again.

This is so foul a display of injustice it’s fortunate the state of North Carolina denied their requests to spare this monster who murdered four people from 1969-1978, including her former husband and her own mother. The vicious idea that someone can be absolved of all their wrongdoings by confessing to the unknown and unknowable their “sins,” no matter how heinous, cuts deep into the entire fabric of America and the world.

Barfield had confessed to the murders, and maintained a calm, congenial demeanor. Fellow inmates referred to her as “Death Row Granny.” Her case even attracted attention from televangelist Billy Graham’s wife and daughter, who put in motion a campaign to safeguard the murderous matriarch. They sensed that she should have had breath in her lungs.

On her path of destruction, Barfield had used arsenic on one of her former husbands her mother, and two disabled people because she’d become addicted to prescription drugs, and she murdered them to prevent them from discovering she’d stolen money to support her habit. Her crime was premeditated, and self-serving. She either didn’t think, or didn’t care, about their lives, or her own even if she didn’t get caught. In other words, she misapplied reason to plan and commit the crimes not to evaluate the potential long-term consequences of it. She knew what she was doing was wrong, she thought she could get away with it.

Does this sound like a life worth saving? Does this seem like a person fit for existence? To say that someone is born-again implies they’ve been wiped clean of every wrong they’ve done in their entire life. This evasion of reality can only come from a system of philosophy corresponding to death. There is no “eternal life” or continuation of living for anyone who does such psychopathic acts as Barfield. Such a system is consonant with unreality and for deadly figures such as Barfield, it relates to an ideology that excuses terrible actions.

It makes just as much sense as to be “dead-again.” Some people believe they lived a previous life. So, by that “logic,” they’ve already died. This time they were actually born-again, but in the sense they passed through their mother’s birth canal.

For Barfield, her death signaled that anyone who causes the deaths of multiple people should be treated with as much force as they exacted against those innocents. Despite her maternal disposition, Barfield was a savage who deserved her final punishment. Born-again or not, North Carolina served justice the day that that state ordered for Barfield to die.

No amount of contrition can account for the lives that Barfield stole from her victims. It doesn’t matter if she was a model death row inmate who counseled young females and entertained the other scum of the earth ready to be erased. Just because she experienced a mystical “awakening” doesn’t justify the fact that she dispatched four people. These were people close to her who trusted her and she banished all rationality. And the prescription drugs were no excuse for her viciousness.

Barfield revealed her evil and will remain dead.