Alabama is set to execute its first inmate in a year tonight despite state’s history of botched lethal injections: Handyman, 64, due to be put to death for killing 75-year-old with claw hammer to steal her purse while high on crack
- James Barber was convicted in the 2001 killing of Dorothy Epps
- A federal appeals court on Wednesday refused to stop the upcoming execution
Alabama is set to execute its first inmate in a year tonight despite the state’s history of botched lethal injections.
James Barber, 64, was convicted in the 2001 beating death of 75-year-old Dorothy Epps.
Barber, a handyman who knew Epps’ daughter, confessed to killing her with a claw hammer and fleeing with her purse while high on crack.
A federal appeals court on Wednesday refused to stop an upcoming execution in Alabama, rejecting an inmate’s argument that the state has a history of botched lethal injections.
Barber is scheduled to be put to death on Thursday evening at a south Alabama prison, in the first execution scheduled in the state since Governor Kay Ivey paused them in November for an internal review.
Handyman James Barber, 64, was convicted in the 2001 beating death of 75-year-old Dorothy Epps
‘I have no fear of death,’ Barber said in a phone interview from the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, where he is set to be executed.
‘I have a fair amount of trepidation about the process that they obviously haven’t perfected — to be at their hands and be the first one after they didn’t do a true review of the protocol and made no real changes.’
‘I don’t know what to expect,’ Barber added. ‘But then, I know I’m in God’s hands, so it’s not fear. It’s hard to explain.’
Ivey ordered the review after two lethal injections were called off because of difficulties inserting IVs.
Advocacy groups said a third execution, carried out after a delay because of IV problems, was botched, though the state disputes that.
A divided panel from the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Barber’s execution could proceed.
The judges said the state conducted a review of execution procedures and his assertion that the ‘same pattern would continue to occur’ was ‘purely speculative’.
For Barber’s killing of Epps, jurors voted 11-1 to recommend a death sentence, which a judge imposed.
Gregory, the granddaughter of Epps, told the Atlantic she was against Barber being put to death.
‘I don’t want it to happen,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to see it done … it will be hard. I spent so long believing in ‘an eye for an eye’ – I’ve changed.’
Kenneth Eugene Smith was convicted in a 1988 murder-for-hire slaying of a preacher’s wife
On September 22, 2022 Alabama had to call off Alan Miller’s execution by lethal injection because of the failure to establish an IV line.
On November 17, 2022, Alabama death-row prisoner Kenneth Smith spent four hours strapped to an execution gurney while state prosecutors tried to lift a stay of execution issued by a federal appeals court, according to pleadings filed by Smith’s lawyers in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama on November 25, 2022.
His execution team repeatedly failed in attempts to set the intravenous execution line intended to put him to death.
He was left strapped to the gurney after prison officials called off the botched execution, without knowing that he was not to be put to death that night.
In his Second Amended Complaint, which challenged his execution by lethal injection based on Alabama’s history of failed and botched execution attempts, Smith spoke of the events on the night Alabama tried and failed to execute him.
Smith was convicted in a 1988 murder-for-hire slaying of a preacher’s wife.
Elizabeth Sennett, 45, was found dead on March 18, 1988, in the couple’s home on Coon Dog Cemetery Road in Alabama’s Colbert County.
She had been stabbed eight times in the chest and once on each side of the neck.
