A Florida man sentenced to death for the 1988 attack on a woman who was sexually assaulted and killed with a hammer, then set on fire in her own bed, is set for execution Thursday after dropping all his appeals and saying he was ready to die
A Florida man sentenced to death for the 1988 attack on a woman who was sexually assaulted and killed with a hammer, then set on fire in her own bed, is set for execution Thursday after dropping all his appeals and saying he was ready to die.
James Phillip Barnes, 61, was to be executed by lethal injection at 6 p.m. at Florida State Prison in Starke. It would mark the fifth execution this year in Florida.
Barnes was serving a life sentence for the 1997 strangulation of his wife, 44-year-old Linda Barnes, when he wrote letters in 2005 to a state prosecutor claiming responsibility for the killing years earlier of Patricia “Patsy” Miller, a nurse who lived in a condominium in Melbourne, along Florida’s east coast.
Barnes represented himself in court hearings where he offered no defense, pleaded guilty to killing Miller and accepted the death penalty. Miller, who was 41 when Barnes killed her, had some previous unspecified negative interactions with him, according to a jailhouse interview he gave to German film director Werner Herzog.
