Jimi Barber Died a Forgiven Man

So little is made of the spiritual transformations of incarcerated people that a particular epithet, “jailhouse conversion,” exists to dismiss the phenomenon. But it’s never been apparent to me that needing redemption in the way a person convicted of a heinous crime does makes that person’s desire for it necessarily dishonest; I’m more inclined to see it the opposite way. And in James “Jimi” Barber’s case, he needed the redemption.

Barber would’ve been the first to tell you as much. In his view, his own life ended the night in May 2001 when, in the midst of a crack-cocaine and alcohol binge, he murdered a 75-year-old grandmother, Dorothy “Dottie” Epps, in her rural Alabama home—not just in that it presaged his own death sentence, but in the sense that he destroyed a slew of prized relationships in that frenzied act of violence. Dottie was the mother of Barber’s former girlfriend, and Barber had become close with the family, attending his girlfriend’s niece’s high-school graduation and working on Dottie’s house in advance of her grandson’s wedding. But all of that—meaningful relationships amid a life otherwise hard—was abruptly wasted within a night, and Barber knew it.

Elizabeth Bruenig: A murder forgiven

He narrated his guilt to Sarah Gregory, Dottie’s granddaughter, in a letter sent in the autumn of 2020. “The self-loathing, shame, shock and utter disbelief at what took place at my own hand almost overcame me,” he wrote. “If not for God’s grace I would be gone.” Barber told Gregory that he initially had trouble adjusting to life behind bars: “I was fighting quite a lot, for a while almost daily. My shame, anger, and denial and the ‘culture shock’ [of incarceration] were more than I could bear. I lashed out at anyone who was a threat, real or imagined.”

Barber needed a diversion. And with few entertainment options available—a snowy television with a tinfoil antenna, a book per month passing through—Barber eventually turned to the word of God. “Boredom made me pick up the Bible,” he wrote to Gregory, herself a person of faith, “and it saved, at that time, my worthless life.”

Barber’s Bible study began simply, with a single read-through, then another. Then, he began to examine the books of the Bible one by one. Over time, Barber said, he attained letters of accreditation in 27 books of the Bible through correspondence courses. He told Gregory that he had read the Bible seven times completely. He prevailed upon authorities at the county jail where he was being held at the time to allow him to be baptized on October 6, 2001, the day he considered his “true birthday.”

Early in his spiritual journey, Barber decided that his would be a complete transformation: “I made a promise to myself in that nasty, dirty, evil county jail, I was never going to become ‘a convict,’” he wrote to Gregory. “I made up my mind that when I left prison either on my feet or in a body bag I was going to be a better man than when I arrived.”

Barber’s opportunity to test that conviction came most clearly during the last week of his life, when he again had the chance to face both his family and the family of his victim.

By that time, Barber had already conducted a years-long correspondence with Gregory, who sat down with me in the lobby of a Holiday Inn in Atmore, Alabama, the day before Barber’s scheduled execution. Since reconnecting via written correspondence in 2020, Barber and Gregory had spent hours on the phone discussing life—in particular, Gregory’s young son. Now, at the end, they were spending much of their remaining time together laughing.

“It was very surreal,” Gregory told me of the gathering in the visitation yard. “But his faith was very strong. He has this unbelievable amount of peace to him right now amongst everything.” The atmosphere was open, affectionate, warm. Barber was “laughing and carrying on.” At one point members of Barber’s family gathered for a group picture, and called Gregory in when she stepped off to the side. Gregory had been expecting something sadder than what she found: a man curiously unafraid to die.

From the time I met Barber earlier this year, he was adamant about his disposition toward his sentence: “I have no fear,” he told me back in March. “I have none.” A week before he was to die, he sent me an email from Alabama’s death row: “I'm in excellent spirits, Miss Liz!! God has been so faithful and kind to me! Many incredible things occurring just making His presence known! No fear or dread Miss Liz. Just a reverent awe for my Lord. See you soon, in Christ, Jimi.” We had hoped we would get to meet in person, but the Alabama Department of Corrections refused to allow me to visit with Barber. ADOC also refused Kathy Trapp, Gregory’s mother and one of Dottie Epps’s daughters—but she got in anyhow.

“Very few … victims come and talk to the guy, or even much less hug the guy, that killed their mother,” Trapp pointed out, sitting beside her daughter in the Holiday Inn that Wednesday afternoon. But that’s what had happened earlier that day when Trapp had simply followed Gregory into the visitation yard, momentarily slipping past guards monitoring the inflow of approved visitors. Before they recognized their mistake, Trapp told me, she and Barber quickly embraced. He was crying, she recalled, and told her, “I’m so sorry.” Trapp had forgiven him a long time ago, but the hug “finished it,” she said. “Even just for the few minutes I got to go in,” she continued—“I can’t really explain it. I literally can’t. But it meant a lot to me.”

Barber had told another prisoner that he had faith he would get to see Trapp before the end, despite the fact that ADOC had denied her entry. Sitting across from Gregory and Trapp in the dull heat of Alabama’s coastal summer, I was glad to hear that his faith had been rewarded.

The night before Barber’s scheduled execution, members of his family joined Trapp and Gregory for dinner. They were also accompanied by Nathan “Nat” Watkins, an Alabama lawyer and volunteer minister Barber had befriended during his first year in prison. Watkins served as Barber’s spiritual adviser, and was with Barber the following day as he prepared for the end of his life.

“He told me Thursday evening,” Watkins said: “‘This was the week that I wanted; this is just what I wanted it to be.’” Seeing his family there with Gregory and Trapp had been the closure he needed. A warden had let them bring in a guitar, Watkins told me, and the group had sang Paul Simon and gospel music, including a rendition of “Amazing Grace” requested by a female correctional officer. Barber led a march around the yard to “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

Elizabeth Bruenig: A history of violence

Eventually, all of Barber’s visitors were taken from him, and he was left alone in the death-watch holding cell with a phone to contact his lawyers and little else. By that time, the last of his emergency appeals had been filed with the U.S. Supreme Court, and he could do nothing but wait for its ruling to decide his fate. I spent the evening loitering in hotel lobbies—as 6 p.m., the scheduled time of his execution, came and went—with Mara Klebaner, one of Barber’s attorneys, and John Gallo, a former attorney of his. Seven p.m. became eight, and eight closed in on nine and then 10. Around that time Gregory texted me to ask me how we were holding up. “Just nervous,” I said, and returned the question. “Nervous and pacing,” she replied.

While we waited, Barber stayed on the phone with another of his attorneys, who talked with him as the hours wore on and, finally, read the Bible to him until he fell asleep. I was surprised Barber was able to sleep at all, knowing that he could at any moment be awoken by guards to be taken to the gurney where he would be killed, but Barber was evidently more at ease than I had anticipated.

Neither had I predicted just how much a member of a victim’s family might come to dread an execution. But Gregory had told me the day before that she was “losing a friend tomorrow … I would’ve never thought I would’ve ever said that. He was a friend of mine, and I’m gonna miss him.” So much of that was a testament to Barber’s own penitence, the way he had thrown himself into Gregory’s forgiveness and forged a bond from the remnants of what he had broken. If a person is largely a composite of all their relationships and Barber had destroyed himself with his original crime, then he seemed to have refashioned himself somehow, mainly off the strength of his faith. Perhaps that’s why he seemed so peaceful about dying; he had already experienced a miracle, and didn’t have to wonder whether people can be reborn.

Capital punishment is indifferent to redemption. About 10 minutes after midnight on July 21, the Supreme Court ruled that Barber’s execution could go forward. A little over half an hour later, Klebaner, Gallo, and I were in a prison van headed toward the grounds of the William C. Holman Correctional Facility, where Alabama conducts its executions. Once inside, we were led through a metal detector and shuffled into the witness room attached to the execution chamber: a small cinder-block area with a decaying fluorescent light flickering over several rows of chairs all facing a window with a curtain drawn across from the inside. From within, dulled by the glass, we could hear Barber talking with other occupants of the execution chamber. Whatever he said, it made them laugh.

Elizabeth Bruenig: Dead to rights

Eventually someone pulled the curtain aside. Barber was swaddled in a white sheet and strapped to the gurney, looking mild and calm. Watkins stood across the small room from him. When Terry Raybon, one of Holman’s wardens, offered Barber the opportunity to share his last words, Barber noted that he hadn’t been able to bring paper into the room to read off of. Had he been permitted to read the words he intended, Barber would have said:

Lying there, Barber remembered to forgive Alabama Governor Kay Ivey “and the people in this room … for what you are about to do.”

Watkins stepped forward, touched Barber’s foot, and said a silent prayer. Barber looked at him and said that he was ready. Then the drugs began to flow through the IV tubing that ran from an unseen area behind the chamber wall into his hand, and Barber closed his eyes. A little before two in the morning, it was over.

I left Alabama in the predawn dark, almost as soon as prison officials returned us to the casino hotel that the ADOC uses as a rendezvous point for witnesses. The state had at last managed what prisoners and their attorneys had been demanding since last year’s string of three botched executions: an unremarkable judicial killing. And Barber had atoned for his crime. The two things seemed only faintly, antagonistically related, which made what Barber had achieved all the more significant to me. In spite of the state of Alabama, and in spite of what he had done that night in 2001, he had died well.