A federal judge said a death row inmate would not be convicted by a jury today after new DNA testing. The state is fighting back.
Updated: Dec. 02, 2025, 6:01 a.m.Christopher Barbour has spent more than thirty years on Alabama Death Row for the brutal slaying and rape of Thelma Roberts, a Montgomery woman, in 1992. A judge says that new DNA evidence points to someone else, judge says An Alabama Death Row inmate must get a new trial, a federal judge wrote several months ago.
But that doesn’t mean it will happen anytime soon. Instead, the state continues to fight to execute Christopher Barbour, despite learning that his DNA did not match the evidence found at a 1992 crime scene. The Alabama Attorney General’s Office argues Barbour should not get a new trial, threatening to take the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, even though DNA found on the body of a murdered Montgomery mother recently revealed a match to her neighbor — a man who is now in prison for an unrelated killing. Recently, an appeals court gave Alabama a two-month extension to explain why Barbour doesn’t deserve a new trial after all these years.In August, more than 20 years after his lawyers appealed the case, U.S. District Judge Emily Marks ruled that. “The fundamental problem with the position is that DNA was left behind,” she wrote. Barbour was convicted of the brutal slaying of Thelma Roberts, a single mom in Montgomery who was found raped, stabbed to death and set on fire in her home 33 years ago. At the time, Montgomery police found Barbour living behind the mall across town. He caught the attention of police in the months following the murder because he and his friends became suspects in a string of arsons — small fires set in grocery store aisles, where the flames distracted employees while people stole food. After multiple interviews, Barbour confessed to police in Roberts’ death. While he immediately took back the confession and hasit was too late and the confession was the key evidence at his trial. The state has contended for the last three decades that Barbour and two of his friends had beer with the single mother before they raped and killed her. There was no physical evidence from any of the three, nor any evidence that Roberts would let strangers into her home. One of the men, a teenager at the time, was never prosecuted. The other took a plea deal. Barbour and other witnesses, including the victim’s ex husband, said police beat them during interviews. And the FBI was investigating the police in Montgomery at the time for such tactics. The conviction was long before the use of advanced DNA testing. But decades later, in 2021, Barbour’s team was finally allowed to have the remaining evidence tested.DNA showed another manThat DNA led to a man named Jerry Tyrone Jackson, a teenager living across the street from Roberts at the time. He’s been in Alabama’s prison system for the last 22 years for another woman’s slaying in another part of the state, and he wouldn’t talk when lawyers recently asked about the DNA match and Roberts’ murder.Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall’s office had 90 days to begin a new trial for Barbour after the judge’s order. But the state’s top prosecutors don’t want to hold a new trial, and appealed the decision to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals.Yet in early November, the state asked for an extension. Marshall’s office told the court that one of its deputies was having a medical procedure and would be out of work for several weeks. And, the office noted, then-Alabama Solicitor General Edmund LaCour Jr. was resigning after being appointed as a federal judge. The top prosecutor’s office went through several other employees’ situations to explain why they couldn’t work the case. “This shakeup and loss of personnel has created a backlog that the remaining attorneys are attempting to triage as expeditiously as possible,” wrote an assistant attorney general.Barbour’s lawyers responded to the state’s request and told the judge they would accept a 30-day extension but not one for two months. The appeal has been pending for nearly 25 years, they wrote, and “there have been thoroughly substantiated findings as to persuasive evidence of Mr. Barbour’s innocence and there can be no confidence in the underlying conviction of Mr. Barbour in light of constitutional violations of his fair trial rights.” The lawyers also noted that Barbour has been on death row for more than 30 years and will remain there throughout the appeal, making any more delays a threat to his “highly compelling liberty interests. The state’s top prosecutors shot back, writing that they got Barbour’s lawyers to agree to a 45-day extension. Still, said the Attorney General’s Office, that wasn’t enough. “Given the time it will take to brief, argue, and dispose of this appeal, including proceedings in the Supreme Court if necessary, fifteen more days for the opening brief is a small delay.” On Nov. 10, a judge in the appellate court granted the request and said the state had until Jan. 23 to file their official appeal.He was 22 at the time of the crime, homeless and sleeping in a wooded area behind Montgomery’s Eastdale Mall. He was struggling with the death of his mother and, despite a brief stay with his grandparents, Barbour wound up on the streets. Across town in the Chisholm neighborhood, the investigation was long and winding, with most of the interviewees being teenagers or friends of the victim’s two children. Those tales left police struggling to distinguish fact from teenage rumor.Thinking there could be a link between the supermarket fires and the attempted burning of Roberts’ body, police tracked Barbour down at the mall food court. They questioned Barbour “intently,” according to police notes.About two months after the killing, Barbour was fed dinner at the local fire station and allowed to sit on a fire truck. That night, he gave three confessions to investigators. None were in the presence of an attorney. Of the three, one was audiotaped and one was videotaped. One was not recorded at all. According to court records, the FBI was, at the time, investigating Montgomery police for “using physical abuse to induce confessions.” Records do not reflect how that investigation ended. Barbour implicated two other men in his tale, a man named Christopher Hester and a boy who was never prosecuted. According to police at the time, Barbour said Hester raped Roberts, while he and the boy held her down. Barbour said after the rape, he stabbed the 40-year-old single mother.Although he quickly recanted, the confession was allowed to be used at Barbour’s 1993 trial. He was convicted and sentenced to death. Now 56, he’s spent more than half of his life in prison, living among most of Alabama’s death row inmates at William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore. The facility, just north of the Florida border, is where executions are held, but much of the prison was closed in 2020 for deteriorating conditions.Today, the DNA from Jackson “is powerful evidence that Barbour’s confession is false,” Judge Marks wrote in a previous order, “and that Mrs. Roberts’ murder did not occur as the prosecution presented it at trial.” Her August ruling filled dozens of pages, citing case law on the various claims Barbour presented in his lawsuit. She specifically ordered the new trial in response to Barbour’s arguments that the original prosecutors in Montgomery County used false information during his trial and withheld evidence from his original defense team. Barbour’s current lawyers argued that Montgomery prosecutors knew the DNA found on the victim didn’t match either Barbour or Hester, which would prove the confession was false. “The relevant questions are whether Barbour’s statement that Hester raped Mrs. Roberts was false, and whether the prosecutor knew the statement was false,” the judge wrote. “The answer to both questions is yes.” The state attorney general’s office doesn’t dispute the new DNA results. But prosecutors argue it doesn’t exonerate Barbour, either. The state’s latest theory — though they write that it’s not their responsibility to offer one — is laid out in court records. The state said a “likely theory” is that the single mother also had sex with Jackson that same day. That was just before being raped and killed by a group of homeless men who she invited into her house hours later, men who she had no record of knowing and who left no physical evidence behind. At the time, Jackson was 16 and close friends with Roberts’ son. While he had spent some of that fatal night with the victims’ children at a house party down the street, according to testimony, he exposed himself to a 13-year-old girl, and then disappeared several times. According to partygoers, he returned to that house at one point appearing shaken and needing a cigarette. Court records state that Jackson often told Roberts’ son that Jackson “was going to get his mama.” The son testified he thought his friend was joking. Marks said in her 2024 order and in her latest one that the state’s theory “defies logic, common sense, and science.” And, she wrote, a jury wouldn’t buy it. “Applying Occam’s Razor, the physical evidence, DNA test results, expert testimony, and common sense would cause reasonable jurors to doubt the veracity of the State’s theory,” the judge wrote previously. The DNA is “objective, reliable, and undisputed.”The state said it’s also possible that Barbour and Jackson worked together in the crime. Yet, there’s no evidence the two ever met.Barbour’s lawyers approached him at a prison outside of Montgomery. In a deposition, Jackson said officials from the Alabama Attorney General’s Office had already visited. When the state prosecutors showed up and told him who they were, Jackson said he didn’t want to meet with them. He didn’t ask what it was about, only that he wanted an attorney. And Jackson didn’t say much to Barbour’s team, either. When asked if he knew Thelma Roberts or the Roberts family, Jackson said: “On the advice of counsel, I plead the Fifth.” He repeated the answer about 50 times throughout his deposition to any questions that revolved around the Roberts family or the murder. Soon after Roberts’ slaying in 1992, Jackson moved to the northern part of the state, settling in the Florence area. Years later, when he was in his late 20s, Jackson was convicted of murdering a woman named Monique Vaughn, who lived just blocks away. Court records in that case show that Jackson beat and stabbed Vaughn in her home in 2001, after she “rebuffed his sexual advances.” Vaughn had let Jackson inside her home, as she was friends with his wife at the time. Autopsy reports show she suffered multiple stab wounds and blunt force trauma to her head, and court records describe the crime scene inside as “massive,” with blood in almost every room in the house. Her baby was in his nursery during the attack, but was unharmed.After the DNA came back, the judge questionedShe said it was likely that given all the information, a jury would not have convicted Barbour for the killing. “It is puzzling that in this case, the State downplays the significance of the new DNA evidence when the State otherwise relies on similar DNA evidence to secure convictions and clear cold cases,” Marks wrote. The state’s theory of consensual sex with a teen before a tragic rape and murder, committed without any clues, didn’t make sense, the judge wrote.Ivana Hrynkiw reports on the Alabama justice system which includes the Alabama Department of Corrections, state and federal courts, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court. She also...
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