A Fort Worth man convicted of killing his pregnant girlfriend and her 7-year-old son more than 10 years ago now has an execution date scheduled for October.
Stephen Barbee, who has maintained his innocence for years and argued that his confession to police was coerced, is now slated to die on Oct. 2, according to Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Jeremy Desel.
The now-52-year-old was sent to death row in 2006, after a Tarrant County jury found him guilty of the murder of Lisa Underwood and her son Jayden. The slain woman's friends only realized she was missing when she didn't show up for her baby shower.
The day of the slayings, a sheriff's deputy stopped Barbee walking along a service road in a wooded area, but the man fled after giving a fake name. Later, authorities found Underwood's car in a creek nearby, and decided they wanted to talk to Barbee as a person of interest.
When officers first brought him in for questioning, Barbee said he hadn't seen Underwood for months. But when he went to the bathroom, police said that he copped to everything while alone with one detective in an unrecorded conversation.
In that confession, prosecutors said, Barbee admitted to starting a fight with his girlfriend before holding her face down in the carpet until she stopped breathing and then holding his hand over Jayden's mouth until he did as well.
The North Texas man said he was afraid that Underwood was going to tell his wife about their liaison, according to court records. After his admission, Barbee took police to the shallow graves where he buried the slain bagel store owner and her son.
A Tarrant County jury found him guilty and he was sentenced to death in February 2006.
Early in his appeals, Barbee's attorneys argued that his trial team's work wasn't up to par, that police withheld a videotape of their full interrogation and that his trial lawyers abandoned their client.
But the judge overseeing the case at that point apparently disagreed, rubberstamping the state's claims "without so much as changing a comma," current attorney Richard Ellis wrote in a later appeal. He also called into question the confession used to convict Barbee, arguing that it was coerced and pointing out that police never even wrote down parts of it.
His client, Ellis wrote, later recanted that confession and has since maintained his innocence. But during a whirlwind 2.5-day-trial, the defense team didn't do enough to show that or to investigate information that pointed to another suspect, he said. His latest appeals focused on the claim that his trial attorneys conceded Barbee's guilt even though he didn't agree to that.
But the courts weren't persuaded by those claims, and this year a Tarrant County judge greenlit Barbee's execution date.
The Lone Star State has already executed three men this year, and - including Barbee - 4 more are on the calendar.
Source: Houston Chronicle, Keri Blakinger, May 10, 2019
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
