Florida set to execute inmate James Phillip Barnes in nurse’s 1988 hammer killing

By CURT ANDERSON
Associated Press

A Florida man sentenced to death for the 1988 attack on a woman who was sexually assaulted and killed with a hammer, then set on fire in her own bed, is set for execution Thursday after dropping all his appeals and saying he was ready to die. James Phillip Barnes was also convicted of killing his wife in 1997. The execution by lethal injection set for 6 p.m. at Florida State Prison in Starke would be the fifth this year in Florida. The 61-year-old Barnes was serving a life sentence for his wife’s slaying when he wrote letters in 2005 to a prosecutor claiming responsibility for the killing years earlier of Patricia “Patsy” Miller, a nurse who lived in a condominium in Melbourne, along Florida’s east coast.