‘NO MORE QUESTIONS’

Florida Executes Murderer Who Told Werner Herzog He Killed More

James Barnes, convicted of killing a nurse with a hammer in 1988, is the fifth person the state has executed in the past six months.

Death row inmate James Barnes was given a lethal injection in Florida on Thursday evening, the 104th person executed by the state since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, and the fifth death row inmate executed in the past six months. The 61-year-old gave no final statement, according to the Associated Press. Barnes was sentenced to death in 2007 after confessing to having killed a nurse, Patricia “Patsy” Miller, with a hammer nearly two decades prior. At the time of his confession, Barnes was serving a life sentence for the 1997 strangulation of his estranged wife. In 2012, he told filmmaker Werner Herzog that he’d confessed to Miller’s murder because he’d converted to Islam behind bars. “They say I’m remorseless. I’m not,” he said, according to the Associated Press. “There are no more questions on this case.” However, Barnes also told Herzog that he was responsible for at least two more deaths, including that of a missing teenager. Investigators who reviewed the new confession “found that Barnes was extremely manipulative and was possibly using this confession as a tactic to stay his execution—Herzog agreed,” a spokesperson for the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office told Florida Today. Charges were never filed against Barnes in either case, both of which remain unsolved.