Alabama Death Row inmate James Barber’s execution date set: First to get 30-hour time frame

Alabama Death Row inmate James Barber is set to be executed during a 30-hour time period in late July.

Barber, 64, is currently on death row at William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore. Gov. Kay Ivey announced Tuesday afternoon that Barber is set to die by lethal injection at some point during a time frame beginning at midnight on Thursday, July 20, and ending at 6 a.m. on Friday, July 21.

It’s the first time the state has followed the Alabama Supreme Court’s new procedure of allowing the governor to set a time frame for executions, rather than the court issuing an execution warrant for a single 24-hour period. That rule was recently changed, following the governor’s three-month halt to lethal injections during an internal investigation.

Ivey announced the time frame in a letter to Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner John Hamm. “Although I have no current plans to grant clemency in this case,” she wrote, “I retain my authority…to grant a reprieve or commutation, if necessary, at any time before the execution is carried out.”

The prison system will have 30 hours to set up two intravenous lines for the three-drug lethal injection cocktail and execute Barber, barring any pending appeals or stays from the courts.

Read more: Alabama inmate set for execution asks to die by nitrogen, calls recent lethal injections ‘botched’

Barber was convicted in Madison County for the 2001 slaying of 75-year-old Dorothy Epps. Barber knew Epps because he had previously dated her daughter and he had done home repair work for her. Epps was beaten to death with Barber’s fists and a claw hammer in her Harvest home, according to court records. She suffered multiple skull fractures, head lacerations, brain bleeding, and rib fractures.

In a lawsuit filed by Barber’s attorneys in the U.S. Middle District of Alabama last week, Barber’s lawyers argue he should be executed by nitrogen hypoxia - suffocation on pure nitrogen - instead of lethal injection. The lawsuit calls the method a “readily available alternative,” even though Barber didn’t opt to die by the new method in 2018.

Alabama’s lethal injection process has come under fire after the controversial execution last summer of Joe Nathan James Jr., followed by the two failed execution attempts of Alan Miller and Kenneth Smith.

Barber is the first inmate to have an execution date set in Alabama following Ivey’s three-month moratorium on lethal injections.