Jimi Barber Died a Forgiven Man

So little is made of the spiritual transformations of incarcerated people that a particular epithet, “jailhouse conversion,” exists to dismiss the phenomenon. But it’s never been apparent to me that needing redemption in the way a person convicted of a heinous crime does makes that person’s desire for it necessarily dishonest; I’m more inclined to see it the opposite way. And in James “Jimi” Barber’s case, he needed the redemption.

Barber would’ve been the first to tell you as much. In his view, his own life ended the night in May 2001 when, in the midst of a crack-cocaine and alcohol binge, he murdered a 75-year-old grandmother, Dorothy “Dottie” Epps, in her rural Alabama home—not just in that it presaged his own death sentence, but in the sense that he destroyed a slew of prized relationships in that frenzied act of violence. Dottie was the mother of Barber’s former girlfriend, and Barber had become close with the family, attending his girlfriend’s niece’s high-school graduation and working on Dottie’s house in advance of her grandson’s wedding. But all of that—meaningful relationships amid a life otherwise hard—was abruptly wasted within a night, and Barber knew it.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: A murder forgiven]

He narrated his guilt to Sarah Gregory, Dottie’s granddaughter, sent in the autumn of 2020. “The self-loathing, shame, shock and utter disbelief at what