Alabama invents new arguments to explain away DNA, presses ahead with death sentence

Maybe he was confused. Or scared. But the confession had to be true.

Surely Christopher Barbour just got the name wrong and identified the wrong man who raped a Montgomery woman before Barbour stabbed her to death.

That’s the theory of the Alabama Attorney General’s Office, which is still insisting on keeping Barbour on death row despite DNA evidence that points to another man. The state’s top prosecutors filed new documents with an appellate court asking to stop a federal judge’s decision to give Barbour a new trial.

The remarks came in a court filing earlier this month. The Attorney General’s Office, led by Steve Marshall, wrote that Barbour could be “mistaken” about who raped Thelma Roberts before she was stabbed to death in 1992.

The state is depending on Barbour’s confession: statements made three decades ago after hours of unrecorded interviews and given to a police department that was then under federal investigation for its use of force. Barbour said he was roughed up by police, coached about the crime scene, and then fed dinner by investigators. He immediately withdrew the confession and has maintained his innocence ever since.

That confession still stands. The major wrinkle in the story? New DNA testing.

Barbour’s tale pinned the rape on a man, Christopher Hester, whom he hung out with in homeless encampments behind a Montgomery mall on the other side of town, away from the crime scene. But the DNA, which lay untested for thirty years, revealed that the only identifiers on the victim’s body belonged to a teenage neighbor named Jerry Tyrone Jackson.

“For whatever reason—be it a lie, mistake, or failure of memory— Barbour did not point the finger at Jackson.” The state argues: “Barbour participated in the crime with Jackson but named Hester instead, whether out of fear, confusion, or some other motive.”

Last year a federal judge took a look at the case — the state’s theory of the crime, the lack of physical evidence, and the DNA findings. She ordered a new trial.

Yet Alabama continues to fight for the death penalty, despite the DNA.

Barbour, now 55, was convicted of the 1992 slaying of Roberts, a single mother of two. The slaying occurred when he was a homeless young man living behind the Eastdale Mall.

His lawyers sought new testing for 20 years. When a judge eventually allowed it to go forward, DNA found on Roberts’ body was identified as belonging to Jackson, her neighbor from across the street who was also her son’s close friend. That match, made in 2023, revealed no traces of Barbour nor the two others he had implicated in the crime.

It wasn’t hard to make an identification – Jackson’s DNA was already in law enforcement’s database when the match came back. Soon after Roberts’ murder, Jackson moved to the northern part of the state. Now, he’s serving a life sentence in an Alabama prison for the 2001 murder of a woman who rebuffed his sexual advances. That woman, Monique Vaughn, lived just blocks away from Jackson. She was beaten and stabbed to death.

But Alabama’s top prosecutors have said the DNA revelation — the fact that Jackson is already in prison for another murder — does not matter much.

The match to Jackson doesn’t prove Barbour’s innocence, the office argued in court filings. Actually, the office wrote, “the case against Barbour is stronger now than it was at trial.”

Roberts died by being stabbed to death, wrote prosecutors, not by rape. DNA might have revealed who had sex with the victim before she died, but it doesn’t prove who put the knife in her.

And “even if Barbour lied or was mistaken about Hester’s involvement, there are plenty of other explanations for the misidentification. The most obvious… is that Barbour was afraid of Jackson.”

This month, the state only doubled down on that claim– despite no one saying the two had ever met.

Their comments were part of the state’s latest request that the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals overturn the ruling granting Barbour a new trial.

Sitting on the bench in Montgomery, U.S. District Judge Emily Marks said last August that Barbour deserved another shot at justice and that the state’s evolving theories didn’t line up with common sense or science.

“The fundamental problem with the (state’s) position is that DNA was left behind,” she wrote in her order.

She previously wrote that Jackson’s DNA “is powerful evidence that Barbour’s confession is false… and that Mrs. Roberts’ murder did not occur as the prosecution presented it at trial.”

Almost immediately following the judge’s ruling in Barbour’s favor, the state said it would appeal. The top prosecutors officially filed their brief in January to block a new trial.

After securing no solid leads for a month in the March 1992 killing, Montgomery law enforcement was stumped. Then, along came Barbour and his friends, who were also homeless and living in a makeshift campsite behind the Eastdale Mall.

“He is a whimpie little thing, and scares real easy,” wrote the lead detective about his interactions with then 22-year-old Barbour.

About two months after the killing, Barbour was fed dinner at the local fire station and allowed to sit on a fire truck. That night, he gave three confessions to investigators. None were in the presence of an attorney. Of the three, one was audiotaped and one was videotaped. One was not recorded at all.

Although he quickly recanted, the confession was allowed to be used at Barbour’s 1993 trial.

Court records show that in 1992, the FBI was investigating Montgomery police for “using physical abuse to induce confessions.” Records do not reflect how that investigation ended.

There are other issues in the confession, too. Barbour’s confession doesn’t mention the plastic bag left over Roberts’ head, which was removed by her teenage son when he found his mother’s body. In the confession, Barbour and his two accomplices came to the Roberts’ house to drink beer with her—a religious woman who friends say didn’t smoke or drink — but no beer cans were found at the crime scene. Someone removed the smoke detector in the house, but Barbour misidentified where it was found. He said he set a fire; there were actually three.

Yet in its latest brief, the state calls these “minor discrepancies” and “peripheral details” and says the confession’s “core narrative” aligns with the crime scene. “He still cannot explain how he accurately confessed,” wrote the state.

At his 1993 trial, prosecutors’ theory of the case was the one told by Barbour. But in the years since the DNA match, the state has created several theories: That Jackson, then 16, could have had consensual sex with Roberts before she happened to be killed. Now they’ve also said Barbour and Jackson could have worked together.

“At best for Barbour,” wrote prosecutors, “this could be probative of Jackson raping Ms. Roberts. But it is not evidence that Barbour was not the murderer, that he had some alibi, or that he was not present at the scene.”

Both Barbour and Jackson say they’ve never met. But the denial “does not establish that the two could not have been present at the crime scene simultaneously,” wrote the state.

“Barbour’s conviction did not require a finding that Hester or Jackson or anyone else in particular raped Ms. Roberts,” the AG’s Office wrote.

Hester pleaded guilty to a lesser charge in the Roberts slaying and was sentenced to 24 years in prison. He also confessed as part of his plea agreement, but his story differed from Barbour’s. He said there was no rape, named a different person as an accomplice in addition to Barbour, and said he had different motives. While Hester “offered a somewhat different account of the murder,” wrote the AG’s Office this month, “it supported all the facts necessary to sustain Barbour’s capital murder conviction.”

Hester was released from prison a decade ago. Court records show that since then he has not been charged with any violent crimes — he’s gotten a few traffic tickets and has failed to update his address with the sex offender registry. The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office currently lists him as homeless.

In their filings with the appellate court, Barbour’s longtime attorneys wrote that the new DNA match “proves beyond doubt” that the case as prosecuted more than 30 years ago is false. With their new theories, the lawyers wrote, “the State cannot defend a capital conviction based on a wholly different theory of the crime than the one used to convict.”

They wrote that parts of the confession did not line up with the crime scene because it was false and coerced. “The true assailant would have known these facts, but someone whose familiarity was a function of a crime-scene photo would not.”

From 2001 until 2021 Alabama refused to let Barbour’s legal team retest evidence, and “unequivocally opposed every effort, in every forum.”

The state has argued Barbour’s case should have gone through state courts instead of the federal court.

Source: al.com, Ivana Hrynkiw, April 30, 2026

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."

— Oscar Wilde

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