An execution warrant has been issued for Alabama Death Row inmate James Barber. It’s the first execution set since the state failed to carry out two planned executions last fall, and the first with new rules in place allowing the governor to choose the execution date.
Barber, 64, has been on death row since 2004 for the fatal beating of 75-year-old Dorothy Epps.
Epps was beaten to death with a claw hammer in 2001 inside her Harvest home. Barber had worked as her handyman and known her socially, according to court records.
During one of his appeals, attorneys for Barber argued that he had smoked crack cocaine, taken painkillers, and consumed alcohol in the days before Epps’ death, leading to a level of intoxication that meant Barber could not form intent for murder.
Barber’s case has been sealed with the Alabama Supreme Court.
On Wednesday, the Alabama Supreme Court granted the Alabama Attorney General’s request for an execution warrant. The state had asked for an execution date for Barber on the day Alabama allowed lethal injections to proceed in February, following a short halt while the state conducted an internal review of its lethal injection procedures.
The only change publicly known to Alabama’s execution protocol during that three-month moratorium was the Alabama Supreme Court ending the midnight deadline.
The state’s highest court authorized a rule change allowing for an execution warrant to be issued for a “time frame” rather than a single day, allowing the governor to choose the timing of an execution. It’s a shift from how the process formerly worked, when the high court set a 24-hour period for executions. If an execution didn’t happen by midnight on that specified date, the execution had to be called off.
That happened twice last fall, once for Alan Miller and again for Kenneth Smith, when prison workers couldn’t start intravenous lines for the lethal injections before midnight on their respective execution dates.
The warrant issued Wednesday for Barber says Gov. Kay Ivey will set a time frame for Barber’s lethal injection “which shall not begin less than 30 days” from the May 3 order.
It’s unclear how long the “time frame” will last.
Previously, Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner John Hamm called the midnight rule “unnecessary deadline pressure for Department personnel.”
Source:
al.com, Staff, May 3, 2023
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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
