Tell me what you care about and I’ll tell you who you are. I care about Dorothy Epps who was brutally beaten to death in her home. Justice Sotomayor and her fellow court leftists care about the monster who killed her.
Here’s what happened.
On Sunday, May 20, 2001, James Barber brutally murdered Dorothy Epps at her home in Harvest, Alabama, taking her life so that he could steal her purse.
Dorothy Epps was home alone the night of her murder. Mrs. Epps knew and had a friendly relationship with James Barber, who in the past had dated her daughter and had been hired to do repair work on her house. When Barber knocked on Mrs. Epps’s door, she probably invited him inside, having no reason to suspect his malevolent intent.
After entering her home, Barber viciously and mercilessly attacked Mrs. Epps, a 75-year-old woman who weighed 100 pounds, striking her in the face and then beating her to death with his fists and a claw hammer.
Dorothy Epps suffered multiple skull fractures, head lacerations, fractured ribs, injuries to her neck, mouth, and eye, and bleeding over her brain. She also suffered multiple defensive wounds, establishing that she was facing Barber at times, was conscious and aware of what was happening, and tried to fend off his blows with her bare hands.
After murdering Mrs. Epps, Barber grabbed her purse and ran from the scene, leaving behind him a home now covered in blood, including on the floors, furniture, walls, and ceiling. He also left bloody footprints on Mrs. Epps’s body—and a bloody handprint on a counter.
Days later, Barber was arrested and voluntarily confessed to the murder of Dorothy Epps, providing police with an elaborate account of his crimes. He admitted that “the crime was senseless and stupid” and that he deserved “to be charged and put to death” for committing it.
Justice Sotomayor and her fellow pro-crime justices disagree.
The court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, declined to block the execution of James Barber, who was put to death at about 2 a.m. local time.
“This court’s decision denying Barber’s request for a stay allows Alabama to experiment again with a human life,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissenting opinion joined by her liberal colleagues, Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Barber had argued that the execution would violate his right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment under the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment.
Barber was executed by lethal injection, which is a far kinder death than he gave Dorothy Epps. He got a last meal of “loaded hash browns, a western omelet, spicy sausage and toast” and, despite the pro-crime leftist clamor, including by the court’s Wise Latina, suffered no particular pain.
He also lived for over two decades after the murder.
To whatever extent Barber is a victim, it’s not of Alabama which kept him around all these years and gently executed him, but of the dysfunctional leftist drug culture that pro-crime activists helped nurture.
Barber first used cocaine around age 20 and started using it “quite heavily” when he began making good money at his job. Around this time, he stopped using marijuana and primarily used alcohol and cocaine. Although he was known for his good demeanor “when he was not high on substances,” when he was high, his personality changed-“obnoxious was the word [she] heard over and over again,”. He had romantic relationships, but they fell apart because of his substance abuse. He had become somewhat violent with family members, once punching his younger brother and once punching his 13-year-old nephew in the back when his nephew commented that he was staggering. He was arrested for slapping Liz Epps, the victim’s daughter.
Barber would sometimes “stay high for about three, four days” with little sleep. Most of the money he made went to drugs, and he often stole or borrowed money from friends to buy drugs. He used cocaine heavily for about 10 years, was sober for about a year, and then relapsed after an injury that led him from pain pills back to cocaine. At the time of Epps’ death, Rosenzweig reported, Barber was using “about three to four hundred dollars’ worth of crack cocaine a week and had also resumed his use of alcohol” a few weeks earlier.
This is the ‘brave new world’ that the pro-crime Left has given us. The Left creates monsters, unleashes them, and then blames us for trying to protect ourselves from its monsters.
Tell me what you care about and I’ll tell you who you are. I care about Dorothy Epps who was brutally beaten to death in her home. Justice Sotomayor and her fellow court leftists care about the monster who killed her.