On Valentine's Day, Louella Eicher had a date with the man who killed her son.
She didn't care about the long drive from Upper Marlboro to Jessup, or the forbidding gray facade of the prison, or the dark little room where she had to sit, or the sad irony of the day.
She was going to be there when they decided whether Willie Brice got parole.
"I don't want him to get out," Mrs. Eicher said of Brice. "He took my son."
Yesterday was the first time members of the public attended a state parole hearing. Such proceedings had been shrouded in secrecy until the 1994 General Assembly passed a law permitting victims and their families to attend hearings involving their assailants.
The hearings have little of the formal trappings of court. They are held in prisons, in small offices with commissioners or hearing officers sitting across a table from inmates. And they take place long after most people have forgotten a prisoner, after the details of the crime have faded.
Yesterday, the victims came as reminders of what happened years ago.
But Mrs. Eicher and the victims who attended two other hearings in Jessup yesterday were not allowed to do anything more than watch from an adjoining room.
Allowing victims to speak would turn parole hearings into "adversarial" proceedings -- "and then we have a whole different ballgame," said Leonard A. Sipes Jr., a Parole Commission spokesman. Victims, he noted, always have been able to write or call commissioners with their concerns about parole decisions.
Mrs. Eicher sat with an envelope marked "impact statement" unread on her lap.
Thomas Scott Eicher was 20 years old, a computer technician engaged to be married, when Brice shot him in what Prince George's County police described as a drug deal gone bad on the last day of May 1988. Although court records show Mr. Eicher previously had been involved with drugs, his mother believes hewas killed because he was driving a new truck and Brice and an accomplice had decided to rob him.
"I don't care what the reason my son was there," Mrs. Eicher
said, watching Brice, 37, from behind a one-way mirror that separated two parts of a room specially designed for the open hearings at the Maryland Correctional Institution at Jessup. "No one has the right to take someone's life."
Open hearings were scheduled at a Hagerstown prison last week, but nobody came because of the weather, said Parole Commission Chairman Paul J. Davis.
Yesterday, too, was a day of false starts, as officials tried to make the prison atmosphere somehow hospitable to victims, while balancing security needs with the new access ordered by legislators.
For example, the intercom system for spectators did not work for more than an hour, garbling the sometimes heated exchanges between Brice and parole commissioners Michael C. Blount and Frank G. Pappas. Mrs. Eicher strained to understand the words.
After hooking up another faulty intercom and two walkie-talkies, the prison's security chief was able to connect the rooms with two speaker phones, allowing spectators to make out what was going on.
That was just in time for Martha Greenhill to hear her former husband, who was convicted of shooting her several times. Asked what he thought about his crime seven years ago, he said, "To tell you the truth, I don't even think of her."
At 68, Fred Lemuel Greenhill presented a difficult parole decision. His age and the fact that he has served almost all of his eight-year sentence might argue against his continued incarceration at the maximum-security Maryland House of Correction Annex. Yet his crime was serious, and his former wife said after the hearing that he has threatened her life since going to prison.
"I want to be abreast of what's going on," Ms. Greenhill said, explaining why she had asked to attend the hearing. "I don't want to be sitting somewhere, and here he comes."
Hearing officer Patricia G. Ray postponed a recommendation in Greenhill's case, saying she wanted to review more records concerning his prison history.
Tina Miele was determined to be there when her former husband, Nicholas H. V. Miele, 43, a former Baltimore police officer who stabbed her repeatedly in 1989, told a hearing officer why he should be let out early from his 21-year sentence.
When her car broke down about a mile west of the prison along Route 175 yesterday morning, she started walking. A woman picked Ms. Miele up and drove her to the prison gatehouse, from which she walked again, down the curving drive, past the barbed wire and beige watchtowers.
Miele's voice shook as he told the hearing officer of his accomplishments in prison. He blamed the stabbing on his anger over problems in his marriage.
"I wasn't a bad person, and this was totally out of my character," Miele said. "I wish I would never have done it."
Ms. Ray also put off her decision in that case while she awaits results of a psychological evaluation.
"There isn't anything at all to indicate that my life is going to be the same if he's paroled," said Ms. Miele, who since has become a volunteer at the House of Ruth shelter for battered women. Still, she acknowledged, "the reality of it is that he's going to get out someday."
Mrs. Eicher was the only person attending a hearing yesterday who left knowing a verdict.
It was Brice's first parole hearing, scheduled because, after 6 1/2 years, he has served a quarter of his 25-year sentence for second-degree murder.
Mr. Pappas did most of the questioning, hammering away at Brice's account of the day Mr. Eicher was shot and chastising the prisoner for "disrespecting" correctional officers several years ago. "You have an attitude problem. Do you admit that?"
Brice continued to claim that someone else did the shooting. Then it was his turn to make a case for freedom.
He said he had had a bit of college behind bars and some vocational training. He offered a letter from his mother and from someone who promised to give him a job. "I have a lot to offer society," he said.
Mr. Pappas didn't buy it, noting that Brice continued to sell drugs at age 31. "You had a lot to offer society . . . but that wasn't the avenue you took. At 31, I'd think you'd quit playing that song," he said.
"It was, like, my recreation," Brice replied.
Brice didn't see Mrs. Eicher through the hearing room's one-way glass, but she could see him. Mostly just the back of him, but that was enough: When Mr. Pappas told Brice he would spend at least another seven years in prison before another parole hearing, Mrs. Eicher could see his disappointment. And she could feel her own relief.
"Yes," she sighed, pumping her right arm in victory.
Then she cried.