Alabama is asking a federal appellate court to stop the new trial for a man who has spent more than 30 years on death row for a crime that DNA doesn’t tie him to.
The Alabama Attorney General’s Office asked the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals late Friday night to overturn a lower court’s ruling that Christopher Barbour deserved a new trial. The federal judge who made the ruling said if tried today, a jury likely wouldn’t convict Barbour.
Barbour, 56, has been on death row for 33 years after he was convicted in the 1992 murder of Thelma Roberts. He has been in court for decades, but recent DNA testing revealed no traces of Barbour nor his codefendant on the victim—instead, the DNA showed Roberts’ then-neighbor Jerry Tyrone Jackson had sex with Roberts right before she died…