Thompson witness says he should be executed

A Shelbyville woman who was a key witness in the trial of a man on death row says if she was a juror in a murder case, she'd not be able to vote for execution.

Nevertheless, Vavial Jamison, 65, says Gregory Thompson, the confessed and convicted killer of a Shelbyville woman on Jan. 1 1985, should be executed as directed by his Coffee County jury.

"Somebody needs to do that other than me," said Jamison, who's lived in Bedford County for nearly all her life and remembers well Thompson's trial and the impact of the death of his victim, Brenda Blanton Lane.

Lane was a niece of Jesse Blanton who was the police chief here at the time. She was also a former Times-Gazette reporter then working for the United Methodist Publishing House at its offices in Nashville.

"I always said I was for the death penalty, but I could not carry it out," Jamison said as she reflected on the Thompson case.

Because the state Supreme Court has set Feb. 7 as Thompson's execution date, the 43-year-old inmate is the focus of recurring statements, motions and responses by a Nashville lawyer, a federal defender in Knoxville, the state's attorney assigned to capital cases, and the Tennessee Coalition to Abolish State Killings.

Thompson was convicted of stabbing Lane to death after abducting her from the Big Springs Shopping Center, then the location of Wal-Mart. He's confessed to doing so to get her car so he and his girlfriend could drive to Georgia. Lane was stabbed to death in Coffee County near Manchester.

It had been warm and sunny, that New Year's Day, now almost 21 years ago, Jamison said. "I think it was around 6 p.m.," she recalled. "It was still light."

She'd gone to shop at Wal-Mart "just to get out of the house," Jamison said. "I had a cousin visit from New Mexico and he took a nap and my boy went to play down the street. I just said I'd go to Wal-Mart."

If she bought something, she doesn't remember what it was.

And she never really saw what was going on, but she heard things and interpreted them very differently from what they really were.

She parked next to Lane's car.

"I did not know Brenda. If I did, I might have noticed more.

"I was always taught to mind your own business," she continued. So she paid little attention to the mixed race couple, rare at that time.

For that reason, she didn't think something was odd. Thompson is black. The woman convicted as his accomplice is white. Lane was white.

"There was a tall, slim, black man and a short, chubby white woman. I thought Brenda was a little old lady -- she was small -- and they were helping her across the street. [Lane was actually about 5 foot, 7 inches, making one wonder if she might have been crouched in fear.]

"He had a long trench coat on and had his arm around her like he was helping her."

The crime was, at that point, a car jacking.

"I heard the man's voice; 'Oh, go on. Get in there,' and the white woman got in the back seat."

Jamison went in the store and then, for some reason, she turned around and looked back outside through a window and saw JoAnne McNamara looking back out of the back of the car.

McNamara was released on parole in August this year after spending 20 years in prison as Thompson's accomplice.

"Her eyes were as big as silver dollars," Jamison recalled of McNamara. "And then they drove off.

"At the time, I was driving back and forth to Columbia," the now-retired telephone company employee said. "I listened to the radio news [the next morning] and at first, the time [given for the crime] was about 2 p.m.

"Four to five days later, they changed the time [of the abduction as reported in news accounts] and it was like a movie," Jamison said. "It all came back to me.

"I told a friend, 'I think I know something about this.'"

So she told police.

"Detectives said I probably missed it by a couple of minutes. In other words, it could have been me."

Months later, Jamison had an opportunity during Thompson's trial to look at the defendant and she now remembers she said to herself then, "This was somebody's baby. What has happened. What makes a human being turn ... so their thought process allows them to do something so cruel to others?"

It's at that point in Jamison's explanation of her experience that she stops and says she learned in the courtroom that while she was for the death penalty, she can't sentence someone to death for a crime.

Nevertheless, she's conflicted.

"I believe it should have been carried out at least 15 years ago," she said of the execution now some 3-1/2 months away.

"When he committed that crime, he knew what he had done," she said. "He told them where to find the body.

"I am confused in my own mind, religiously," she said when asked if there was some inconsistency in her feelings. "I know the church doesn't support the death penalty. I know mine doesn't."

She's Methodist.

Death penalty opponents have argued that Thompson isn't competent to be executed because he doesn't know what's happening, although the state says he knows at least two things: He's sentenced to die and it's because of Lane's death. Legally, that's all that's needed for the execution to proceed, given case law followed by Tennessee courts.

"I don't know what killing him would accomplish if he doesn't know what it's for," Jamison said.

As for any deterrent effect on others, she replies, "I don't know. This was very calculated. Do you think people in these situations think about what they're doing?"

Asked if her point is that if criminals don't think about what they're doing, then there's no deferent, she replied, "That's what I would wonder.

"It's not about doing away with the death penalty. We need to be very cautious about using it."

Death penalty opponents have submitted doctor statements saying Thompson is mad.

"If this had been finished 2-3 years after, or 5-10 years [after the murder], there probably wouldn't be a question of his sanity," Jamison said.

"Brenda was a very popular and loved person. Had it [the execution] been carried out sooner, it would have had more meaning" to the general population, she said.

Thompson's execution will still have meaning for Lane's surviving relatives, Jamison said.

She says she believes her testimony during Thompson's trial established circumstances about how his crime was committed.