Alabama has executed a man, resuming its use of the death penalty after three botched killings last year.
James Barber was pronounced dead on Friday at 1.56am after receiving a lethal injection at a south Alabama prison.
The US supreme court denied a request for a stay. The majority did not comment. In a dissent that was also signed by the two other liberals on the nine-judge panel, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the court was allowing “Alabama to experiment again with a human life”.
She said the eighth amendment, which forbids cruel and unusual punishment, “demands more than the state’s word that this time will be different. The court should not allow Alabama to test the efficacy of its internal review by using Barber as its ‘guinea pig’.”
Last year, Alabama botched three executions by lethal injection. The first death row inmate, Joe Nathan James Jr, took more than three hours to die. Two other executions were abandoned.
After an internal review, the state said this year it was ready to resume executions. Barber sought to avoid his execution, in part by opting to die by nitrogen hypoxia, a method of state killing Alabama says it wants to use but is not ready to do so.
Court filings revealed that the Alabama review changed only death chamber personnel and the amount of time given for killing an inmate.
Barber, who was 64 when he died, murdered 75-year-old Dorothy Epps with a hammer, while addicted to numerous substances, in 2001. Epps’s granddaughter, Sarah Gregory, has spoken of how she came to forgive Barber and forge a friendship with him. She said other members of her family did not feel the same way.
On Friday morning, before he was killed in the death chamber at Holman correctional facility in Atmore, Barber said: “I want to tell the Epps family I love them. I’m sorry for what happened. No words would fit how I feel.”
He also said he wanted to tell the Republican governor of Alabama, Kay Ivey, “and the people in this room that I forgive you for what you are about to do”.
After his last words, the Associated Press reported, Barber “spoke with a spiritual adviser who accompanied him into the death chamber. As the drugs were administered, Barber’s eyes closed and his abdomen pulsed several times. His breathing slowed until it was no longer visible.”
The Alabama corrections commissioner, John Hamm, said Barber was given “three sticks in six minutes”.
The Alabama attorney general, Steve Marshall, said: “Justice has been served. This morning, James Barber was put to death for the terrible crime he committed over two decades ago: the especially heinous, atrocious and cruel murder of Dorothy Epps.”
Before the execution, Reprieve, an international human rights group, said: “There’s no humane method of execution. Executions aren’t working – and it’s torture … The state shouldn’t be resuming executions, it should be ending them once and for all.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report
