There are times when crimes committed are so heinous, so brutal, so inhuman that the death penalty is well deserved. The case of the Briley Brothers' rampage in Virginia is such a case for capital punishment. A little more than twenty-five years ago, the terror of brutal, escaped death-row convicts began: "On May 31, 1984 -- the largest escape of condemned prisoners in U.S. history unleashed itself from Mecklenburg's death row. Planned for years and secretly revealed in advance to prison officials by worried inmates, the escape exposed a prison environment dominated by a band of convicts, not their keepers" (McKelway para. 2). The prison in Mecklenburg, Va. Was supposed to be a state-of-the-art facility where chances of escape were non-existent. But, this caper, called The Great Escape, ended up terrorizing the state of Virginia and surrounding states, and causing havoc and recriminations for months afterwards. As McKelway (2009) explains in his article, it took nineteen days of sheer fear before the escapees were either killed or recaptured.
The most brutal of the escapees who had obviously been in on the planning for probably years, were the three Briley Brothers, Linwood, James and Anthony. Why were they on Death Row? "In 1979, they would carry out, along with teenage accomplice Duncan Eric Meekins...the vilest rampage of rape, murder and robbery... The onslaught is believed to have killed or severely wounded as many as 20 victims in the Richmond area... butchered, crushed, shot, tortured, raped, and, once dead, desecrated" (McKelway para. 3). The Briley brothers seemed to have turned to crime while still in their middle teens. By the time they were in their mid-Twenties, they had been sentenced first to multiple life terms, and eventually put on Death Row.
Why had the brothers killed? They believed they had to: "James and Linwood Briley killed to eliminate witnesses to the robberies they committed, but th...