Florida Man with Severe Mental Illness Waives Appeals, Faces August 3^rd Execution Date

A week after Governor Ron DeSantis sched­uled his exe­cu­tion, Florida death-sen­tenced pris­on­er James Barnes (pic­tured) dis­charged his lawyers and waived his appeals. His exe­cu­tion will now pro­ceed on August 3, 2023. Since February 23, 2023, Florida has exe­cut­ed four pris­on­ers. Mr. Barnes will be the fifth pris­on­er exe­cut­ed by Florida this year and the tenth vol­un­teer exe­cut­ed. 

In 2007, Mr. Barnes was sen­tenced to death for the mur­der and rape of Patsy Miller. He was serv­ing a life sen­tence with­out the pos­si­bil­i­ty of parole when he con­fessed to the mur­der after con­vert­ing to Islam. At his tri­al, he waived his right to coun­sel, to a jury, rep­re­sent­ed him­self, pled guilty, and waived all mit­i­ga­tion evi­dence at sentencing. 

Mr. Barnes has a long his­to­ry of men­tal ill­ness and men­tal health cri­sis­es. During his child­hood, his sis­ter said he endured severe phys­i­cal and men­tal abuse at the hands of their father. Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (FADP) has sent let­ters to Governor DeSantis urg­ing him to over­turn Mr. Barnes’ death sen­tence. A judge found Mr. Barnes com­pe­tent for exe­cu­tion; how­ev­er, a med­ical pro­fes­sion­al did not com­plete a men­tal eval­u­a­tion of Mr. Barnes. FADP com­ment­ed that the lack of a men­tal eval­u­a­tion ​“under­scores our need to dou­ble down on our efforts to stop exe­cu­tions and to pass leg­is­la­tion, called the SMI Bill, that would make peo­ple with seri­ous men­tal ill­ness not eli­gi­ble for the death penalty.”

The Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops has also sent numer­ous let­ters urg­ing the gov­er­nor to abol­ish the death penal­ty. In their let­ter, the bish­ops stat­ed, ​“Capital pun­ish­ment is indeed a false answer that does not solve the prob­lem for which it is invoked and intro­duces new ele­ments of destruc­tion. We pray for the vic­tims of heinous crimes and for the pro­tec­tion of the indeli­ble dig­ni­ty of every human being.”