On the morning of January 10, 1977, a man called the telephone operator in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and asked for help. The operator put him through to the police, and the police sent an ambulance to a combination house and store on Highway 82. When the attendants arrived, about ten minutes later, the caller was standing in an open side door and waved them in. In the kitchen they found Lillian Montgomery, the 62-year-old owner of the store, dead on the floor in a pool of blood. She had been shot three times.
The man in the doorway was James Barney Hubbard. He was 46, and he had been out of prison for about three months, after serving roughly two decades for a killing in 1957. He told the officers that Montgomery had shot herself. The physical evidence said otherwise, and twenty-seven years later Alabama executed him for her murder. He was 74, and at that moment no one older had been put to death in the United States since executions resumed in 1977.
Very little about Hubbard's early life is on the public record. The Alabama Department of Corrections lists his birth year as 1930, his race as white and his county of conviction as Tuscaloosa. Court papers name him J.B. Hubbard, alias Billy Hubbard, alias Barney Hubbard, and the 1977 indictment adds the aliases James Billy Hubbard and John Barney Hubbard. In his statement to police in 1977 he mentioned that his mother, whom he called Mrs. Benny Hubbard, was living in a rest home in Northport, across the river from Tuscaloosa.
Records from Bryce Hospital, the state psychiatric hospital in Tuscaloosa, show that he was treated there for alcoholism on and off between August 1957 and May 1977. The same records give a verbal I.Q. of 77, a full-scale I.Q. of 80 and a performance I.Q. of 86. The Eleventh Circuit described the first two figures as in the borderline range for what courts then called mental retardation and the third as low average. Lawyers who later sought to spare his life also spoke of a deprived upbringing, but the courts never set out the details, and none of the sources consulted for this page describe his childhood, schooling or work.
He had at least one daughter, Barbara McKinney, who was with him at the end.
The first killing took place in Tuscaloosa County in 1957. The victim's surname was Dockery. The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, in its 1986 opinion, calls him Carl Dockery; other accounts call him David. The court records consulted say nothing about who he was, his age or his family.
Hubbard was indicted for murder along with a relative, Divid (also spelled Divit) Hubbard, whom the 1979 appeals court described as his father-in-law. The two men were represented by the same lawyer, James Marshall, whom Hubbard and his family had retained for $1,000. At his own trial, Hubbard claimed self-defense. On October 10, 1957, a Tuscaloosa County jury convicted him of second-degree murder, and he was sentenced to fifty years in prison.
What happened after the verdict became part of his later death penalty case. According to the Court of Criminal Appeals, Hubbard had confessed to police after his arrest in 1957 and described how he and Divid Hubbard had conspired to kill Dockery and another person. At trial he recanted the confession, saying he did not remember giving it and that it was untrue. After the jury convicted him, he told the district attorney that the confession was true and that he had lied at trial. He offered to help the state prosecute Divid Hubbard and testified against him. Divid Hubbard was acquitted at a separate trial.
At a coram nobis hearing in 1963, Divid Hubbard testified that Dockery had been unarmed, that he had heard no threat from Dockery and that he had seen no provocation for the shooting. The judge, W.C. Warren, found that Marshall had been wise not to call him in 1957, since his testimony would have hurt Hubbard's self-defense claim. At the 1982 sentencing, the trial judge heard from Olin Zeanah, the lawyer who had prosecuted the 1957 case, and reviewed Hubbard's differing accounts of it. The judge wrote that he noted "with alarm the fact that the first killing was done by Mr. Hubbard upon the promise of money and that he engaged in a conspiracy at the time with one Divit Hubbard to kill two people." No court record consulted names the second intended target or suggests that a second person was killed.
Hubbard's appeal from the 1957 conviction was dismissed on November 18, 1957. He later said he had dropped it because he could not pay for a trial transcript, and that Marshall never told him that as a poor defendant he was entitled to one free. He challenged the conviction again and again: a coram nobis petition in 1962, decided in 1963; a second in 1968, decided in 1969 and affirmed on appeal in 1970; federal habeas petitions denied in 1971 and 1974; and a motion for an out-of-time appeal in 1988. Every court rejected the claims. The judges found that Marshall had no conflict of interest and that Hubbard had understood what he was doing when he signed the dismissal of his appeal.
With credit for good time, Hubbard completed his sentence and was released from prison in October 1976. The Eleventh Circuit said he had served twenty years of the fifty; the Associated Press reported nineteen.
Shortly after his release he moved in with Lillian Montgomery. She ran a store on Highway 82 in Tuscaloosa and lived in the house attached to it. She had at least two sons, Jimmy and Johnny. Jimmy Montgomery, her oldest son, was a retired Army lieutenant colonel by the time of the execution, according to the Birmingham News. She and Jimmy jointly owned a rental house; she collected the rent each month, paid the mortgage and upkeep, and at the end of the year split the profit with him. Jimmy had given her a gold watch set with diamonds as a Christmas present. He testified that she prized it, always wore it and had it repaired at once whenever the band broke.
Witnesses at the 1982 trial said Montgomery and Hubbard lived together as husband and wife. When she was admitted to the hospital on January 5, 1977, five days before her death, the records listed her as Lillian Hubbard. A friend, Mildred Burgin, drove her to the hospital on a visit about a week before her death and saw her give Hubbard $1,100. Burgin testified that Montgomery complained about the bills Hubbard was running up. Jimmy Montgomery testified that over the three months Hubbard lived with his mother, she spent about $10,000 on him, including food and clothing. The AP later reported that she had befriended Hubbard and sponsored his release. The courts' accounts do not say how they met.
The record of the last night of Lillian Montgomery's life comes from witnesses, from the evidence in the house and from Hubbard's own statements, which changed over the course of the day.
On the night of January 9, according to a witness named Rosie Reeves, Hubbard told her he had no money. Between 4 and 5 a.m. on January 10, Montgomery telephoned a man named Robert Gooden and asked him to help start her car. He tried and failed. Around 6 a.m. Hubbard asked a neighbor, Eugene Shultz, to try. He failed too. Both men later testified for the defense that the couple did not seem to be arguing; Shultz said they walked back into the house "arm and arm." Montgomery's blood alcohol level at autopsy was .11 percent.
At some point that morning Montgomery was shot three times with her own .38 caliber pistol. One bullet went through her left shoulder. Another entered her mouth, cut her tongue, shattered her jaw and one of her dentures, and caused heavy bleeding. The third entered above her left eyebrow and passed through her brain. The pathologist, Dr. Henry Santina, testified that the head wound killed her almost instantly and that, judging by the amount of blood, she had been shot in the mouth first and was still alive for some time before the final shot. He also testified that after the wound to the mouth, she could not have spoken in a way anyone could understand. When officers found her, she was holding part of a set of dentures in her right hand.
The Eleventh Circuit dated the killing to around 6 a.m. and said Hubbard called for help an hour or two later. The 1986 state opinion puts the ambulance dispatch at about 8:15. Before calling the police, by his own account, Hubbard telephoned a friend of Montgomery's, Mildred Burgin; his mother at the rest home; and a woman named Nettie at a bar. Burgin testified that he told her, "I think she's down there bleeding to death." Each of them told him to call an ambulance.
The ambulance attendants, David Freeman and Ricky Lee, found Montgomery's body and asked Hubbard whether he had moved anything. He said he had "carried the gun upstairs." They went back outside and locked the door behind them. Tuscaloosa police officers Jack Manley and Charles Stephens arrived at about 8:53, took the key from Hubbard, went in, and radioed for a homicide investigator and the coroner.
While they waited, Manley asked Hubbard what had happened. Hubbard said he and Montgomery had argued the night before and again that morning, that she had gone downstairs at about 7 a.m., and that he had heard two shots. Asked where the gun was, he said he had it. Manley searched him and found the .38 pistol, a partial box of .38 ammunition and a half-pint of Cabin Hollow whiskey. Manley read him his Miranda rights from a card and put him in the patrol car. He had been drinking, but the officers testified that he was not drunk. While sitting in the car, Hubbard showed Stephens his billfold and said, "I'm not a bum."
Sergeant Dempsey Marcum of the homicide unit arrived at about 9:15, with Coroner Earl Mitchell and state toxicologist Jim Britton. The gun was fully loaded. In the kitchen the trash can had been knocked over and garbage scattered across the floor. A mutilated bullet lay on the stove. In a wastepaper basket in the upstairs bedroom were two spent .38 casings; after the autopsy showed three wounds, Marcum went back and found a third. A firearms examiner matched the bullet taken from Montgomery's skull and all three casings to the pistol found in Hubbard's pocket. Britton's tests of the powder pattern on her face put the muzzle between fifteen and thirty-nine inches away for all three shots. Nitrate tests found small amounts of powder residue on both of Hubbard's hands and on Montgomery's right hand. She was right-handed. The two of them appeared to have been alone in the house.
At the homicide office, Marcum read Hubbard his rights again, and Hubbard signed a waiver. The interview began at 11:35 a.m. and lasted about half an hour. Marcum wrote down what Hubbard said, read it back to him and handed it over for signing.
In this statement Hubbard said that at two or three in the morning he had gone down to the store for a half-pint of corn whiskey, that Montgomery had complained of a headache and asked for a pint of bourbon, and that she had mixed herself a large drink. He said she had told him she "wanted to go where her mother was" and that she had so many debts she wanted "to get out of her misery." He said he was dozing when she went downstairs, that he heard two shots, and that he found her on the floor. He quoted her as saying, "I just wanted to leave and get out of the way," and then asking that he and her sons, Jimmy and Johnny, take care of what she had: "You tell Jimmy and Johnny I want you to have my car." He said he took the pistol from under her left hand, carried it upstairs, removed two empty shells, reloaded it and put it in his pocket. He said he "was fixing to go hide it" when the police came.
Partway through signing, Hubbard stopped and asked for a drink "to steady his nerves." Marcum gave him the bottle of whiskey the officers had taken from him at the scene. Hubbard drank and finished signing. A federal district judge later found that Marcum "violated professional standards for police officers" by doing so, but every court that looked at it held that the statement itself had been completed before the drink and that the drink was Hubbard's request, not an inducement.
At the county jail, an inventory of his pockets turned up Montgomery's gold and diamond watch, valued at $400 to $500, with its band catch broken; checks totaling $230, most of them made out to Montgomery or to cash, including a $175 rent check for the house she owned with her son; $260 in bills; and $12.22 in change, twenty-two cents of it in pennies. Hubbard told Marcum that Montgomery had said, after she was shot, that she wanted him to have her watch, her money and her "valuables." Jimmy Montgomery checked the cash register in his mother's store that day and found it empty. Photographs taken before her body was moved showed two rings still on her finger; her son testified that she could not have taken them off.
The state's case rested on a simple point. Hubbard's account required Montgomery to have spoken after she was shot. The medical evidence said the wound to her mouth made speech impossible and the wound to her head killed her within seconds. The Eleventh Circuit later observed that while the statement was not a confession, it was damaging because "the evidence at trial overwhelmingly established its falsity."
A Tuscaloosa County grand jury indicted Hubbard on February 18, 1977, under the Alabama Death Penalty Act. The aggravating circumstance was the 1957 conviction: Alabama made it a capital offense to commit murder within twenty years of a previous murder conviction. In April his public defenders asked for a mental examination. On June 10, 1977, the Lunacy Commission at Bryce Hospital reported that he was competent to stand trial and gave no indication that he had been insane at the time of the shooting.
The trial was held in September 1977. The jury convicted him of first-degree murder with the aggravating circumstance. Under the law then in force, the jury had only two choices, acquittal or a conviction that carried death, and the judge could not instruct on lesser offenses. After a sentencing hearing on October 28, 1977, the court imposed the death sentence. The Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed in 1979, and the Alabama Supreme Court affirmed in March 1980. The Department of Corrections records his arrival on death row as May 31, 1978.
In June 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Beck v. Alabama, which struck down the ban on lesser-offense instructions in Alabama capital trials. On rehearing in August 1981, the Alabama Supreme Court set aside its own judgment in Hubbard's case and ordered a new trial, and the Court of Criminal Appeals sent the case back to Tuscaloosa County in October 1981.
The second trial began on April 19, 1982. The court appointed two lawyers, Douglas Hendrix and Charles Michael Stilson. Hubbard did not testify. His defense was the same as before: Montgomery had killed herself, and he had been upstairs when the shots were fired. Gooden, Shultz and Burgin testified for him. His lawyers argued that he had been drunk when he gave his statement and pointed out that the hospital had listed Montgomery as his wife, which they said showed he had no reason to kill her. They tried to put her medical history into evidence; the judge admitted only her most recent hospital record. Hendrix later testified that the defense had to be careful about attacking the victim's reputation, because it could backfire.
The jury again found him guilty of capital murder and, in a separate penalty phase that began moments after the verdict, recommended death. The defense called no witnesses at that stage. Hendrix and Stilson later explained that Hubbard had given them no names, that he had been out of prison only a few months, that the people he knew locally were Montgomery's friends, and that no member of his family attended the trial. The prosecutor told the jury that "if anyone anywhere ever deserved the death sentence," Hubbard did, and promised to witness the execution himself.
On May 14, 1982, the judge sentenced Hubbard to death. He found three aggravating circumstances: the 1957 murder conviction; that the killing was for money, citing the watch, the checks and the empty till; and that it was especially cruel, because Montgomery had been shot in the mouth and left bleeding on the floor before the last shot. He found no mitigating circumstances. "At the time of the crime the defendant was neither a tender youth nor a debilitated victim of aging," he wrote.
The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction and sentence on May 13, 1986, in a long opinion that again upheld the 1957 conviction and the admission of the Marcum statement. The Alabama Supreme Court affirmed in November 1986, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 1987.
Hubbard then sought post-conviction relief in the Tuscaloosa County Circuit Court, raising some thirty-two claims, most of them about his trial lawyers. After an evidentiary hearing the court denied relief, and the Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed in February 1991. The U.S. Supreme Court again declined review in 1992.
In October 1994 Hubbard filed a federal habeas corpus petition with seventeen claims. On February 3, 1998, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama dismissed it in a 154-page memorandum. On January 7, 2003, the Eleventh Circuit affirmed in an opinion by Judge Gerald Tjoflat. The court rejected his claims that the statement was involuntary because of his alcoholism, low intelligence and the drink Marcum gave him; that the 1957 conviction could not be used because his 1957 lawyer had been ineffective; and that his 1982 lawyers had failed him before trial, at trial and at sentencing. It held that the 1957 conviction, which he had attacked unsuccessfully for decades, had to be treated as "conclusively valid."
By the summer of 2004 Hubbard was 74 and the oldest prisoner on Alabama's death row. His execution was set for August 5 at Holman Prison near Atmore.
His lawyers asked the Eleventh Circuit, and then the U.S. Supreme Court, to stop it on a ground no court had accepted: that executing a man so old and so ill would be cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. Papers filed by his lawyers said tests showed he had dementia, hepatitis, diverticulitis, high blood pressure and severe back pain, and that he was mildly mentally retarded. Amnesty International reported that he had prostate and colon cancer and that his dementia sometimes left him unable to remember who he was or why he was on death row. In his federal filings he said he had not raised his mental state and health earlier because those conditions had not existed when he was younger. His Supreme Court lawyer, Alan Rose, acknowledged that the claim "appears to raise a novel issue" but said it was consistent with other Eighth Amendment claims.
The state said Hubbard was competent to be executed and opposed any delay. "Murderers, especially repeat killers like Hubbard, do not deserve 'leniency' merely because their life of crime does not result in the imposition of a death sentence until later in life," it argued.
Opponents of the death penalty asked Governor Bob Riley for mercy. "Even if one supported the death penalty, it is difficult to understand what purpose James Hubbard's execution would serve," said David Elliott of the Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. Amnesty International urged clemency, citing his age, his illnesses and his I.Q. of 80, which it compared with that of an Indiana prisoner whose sentence had been commuted the month before. Amnesty also expressed sympathy for Lillian Montgomery's family.
On August 4 the Eleventh Circuit refused to delay the execution. On August 5 the U.S. Supreme Court denied a stay, 5 to 4. Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas voted to deny it; Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer would have granted it.
Governor Riley refused to commute the sentence. He called it a violent crime that took the life of an innocent person almost 28 years earlier. "Justice has not been swift in this case, but justice must be delivered. While so much attention is focused on Mr. Hubbard, we should also remember his victim and the loved ones who grieved when she was murdered by Mr. Hubbard."
James Barney Hubbard was executed by lethal injection at Holman Prison on Thursday, August 5, 2004. A corrections department spokesman, Steve Hayes, gave the official time of death as 6:36 p.m. Central Time. Hubbard made no final statement.
His daughter, Barbara McKinney, watched from a separate room and, according to the AP, kept her eyes on him until he died. She did not speak to reporters afterward, and his body was released to her. Six members of Lillian Montgomery's family watched from another room, holding hands; some wept, the Birmingham News reported.
Jimmy Montgomery, then 66, told reporters he was disappointed that Hubbard offered no last words or apology. He said he had not forgiven him and felt Hubbard deserved a harsher death. "I'd just as soon see the electric chair still in use or maybe the firing squad," he said, as quoted by the Birmingham News. "It seems like he just dozed off." He said the family was glad to see that part of their lives end, and that he had prayed for Hubbard's daughter: "It's tough, I'm sure, sitting there seeing your daddy die."
According to Amnesty International, Hubbard was the 37th person executed in the United States in 2004, the 922nd since executions resumed in 1977, and the 29th in Alabama in that period.
There is nothing pending. Hubbard is listed as executed on August 5, 2004, on the Alabama Department of Corrections executions list (inmate number Z361, birth year 1930, arrived on death row May 31, 1978, executed under Governor Riley), checked for this page on October 14, 2026.
Hubbard's age made his execution national news, but the claims made about it at the time varied, and the record did not last long.
Before the execution, the AP wrote that it was "unclear when an inmate of Hubbard's age was last executed." Death Penalty Information Center records showed he would be the oldest prisoner put to death in the United States since executions resumed in 1977. Alabama Public Radio put it as the oldest since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. The Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty went further, saying he would be the oldest person executed in the country since 1941, when James Stephens was executed in Colorado at 76. Democracy Now! reported that he was the oldest person ever executed in Alabama. That last claim was not attributed to any record, and this page has not been able to check it.
The record set by Hubbard lasted sixteen months. In December 2005 Mississippi executed John B. Nixon Sr., who was 77. In January 2006 California executed Clarence Ray Allen the day after his 76th birthday; the AP described Allen as the second-oldest person executed since 1976. Allen's lawyers raised the same Eighth Amendment argument Hubbard had, and the AP noted then that the Supreme Court had refused to block Hubbard's execution despite his claims of advanced age and mental incompetence. As of that 2006 report, the Supreme Court had never set an upper age limit for execution or created an exception for physical infirmity. On April 19, 2018, Alabama executed Walter Leroy Moody Jr., 83, at the same prison where Hubbard died; the Death Penalty Information Center called him the oldest person put to death in the modern era of capital punishment. Moody's lawyers did not raise his age in court.
Hubbard was therefore the oldest person executed in the modern era only from August 2004 until December 2005. He was later surpassed by at least three older prisoners, including Moody in Alabama.
The wider argument raised in his case, over whether age, dementia and decades on death row should bar an execution, was not settled by it. The courts that refused to stop his execution did so without ruling that the claim was valid. In Hubbard's case the age question was tied to a second one: his lawyers said he was mentally incompetent and the state said he was competent to be executed. No court opinion consulted for this page records a full hearing on his competency in 2004.
Proven by conviction: Hubbard killed Dockery in Tuscaloosa County in 1957 (second-degree murder, October 10, 1957), and he murdered Lillian Montgomery on January 10, 1977 (capital murder, convicted in 1977 and again in 1982, upheld on every appeal).
Admitted, then denied, then admitted: in 1957 Hubbard confessed, recanted at trial and, after his conviction, told the district attorney the confession was true. He testified against Divid Hubbard, who was acquitted.
Found by a sentencing judge but never separately tried: that the 1957 killing was done for promised money and that Hubbard and Divid Hubbard had conspired to kill two people. The court records consulted do not name the second intended victim or say why Dockery was targeted.
Disputed by Hubbard to the end: he never admitted killing Lillian Montgomery and maintained that she shot herself. The juries rejected that account, relying on the three wounds, the powder pattern, the pathologist's testimony that she could not have spoken, the casings in the upstairs wastebasket and the property in his pockets.
Disputed in the courts: whether his statement was voluntary, given his drinking, his low I.Q. and the whiskey he was handed before signing; whether his 1957 lawyer was ineffective; whether his 1982 lawyers should have presented mental health and family evidence at sentencing. All of these claims were rejected.
Not established: the exact time of the shooting (the Eleventh Circuit said about 6 a.m.; Hubbard told an officer about 7 a.m.); his precise date of birth; and the first name of the 1957 victim, which court records and news accounts give differently.
1930: Hubbard is born (birth year from the Alabama Department of Corrections).
1957: Dockery is shot and killed in Tuscaloosa County. Hubbard and Divid Hubbard are indicted. Hubbard confesses to police.
August 1957: Hubbard's first recorded treatment for alcoholism at Bryce Hospital.
October 10, 1957: Hubbard is convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to fifty years.
November 18, 1957: His appeal is dismissed. He later testifies against Divid Hubbard, who is acquitted.
1962 to 1974: Coram nobis petitions (decided 1963 and 1969, affirmed 1970) and federal habeas petitions (denied 1971 and 1974) fail.
October 1976: Hubbard is released with good time and moves in with Lillian Montgomery in Tuscaloosa.
January 5, 1977: Montgomery is admitted to hospital, listed as Lillian Hubbard.
January 10, 1977: Montgomery is shot three times at her home on Highway 82. Hubbard is arrested and gives a statement saying she shot herself.
February 18, 1977: Capital indictment.
June 10, 1977: Lunacy Commission finds him competent.
September 1977: First trial; convicted.
October 28, 1977: Sentencing hearing; sentenced to death.
May 31, 1978: Arrival on death row, per the Department of Corrections.
May 1, 1979: Court of Criminal Appeals affirms.
March 7, 1980: Alabama Supreme Court affirms.
June 1980: Beck v. Alabama decided.
August 28, 1981: Alabama Supreme Court reverses on rehearing; new trial ordered (case remanded October 6, 1981).
April 19, 1982: Second trial begins.
May 14, 1982: Sentenced to death again.
May 13, 1986: Court of Criminal Appeals affirms; Alabama Supreme Court affirms November 7, 1986.
1987: U.S. Supreme Court denies review.
1988 to 1989: Out-of-time appeal of the 1957 conviction denied.
February 1, 1991: Denial of post-conviction relief affirmed; U.S. Supreme Court denies review in 1992.
October 1994: Federal habeas petition filed.
February 3, 1998: District court dismisses the petition.
January 7, 2003: Eleventh Circuit affirms.
August 2, 2004: Hubbard asks the Eleventh Circuit to block the execution on grounds of age and illness.
August 4, 2004: Eleventh Circuit denies a stay.
August 5, 2004: Supreme Court denies a stay 5 to 4; Governor Riley denies clemency; Hubbard is executed at Holman Prison at 6:36 p.m., aged 74.
December 2005: John B. Nixon Sr., 77, executed in Mississippi, passing Hubbard's age.
January 17, 2006: Clarence Ray Allen executed in California at 76.
April 19, 2018: Walter Leroy Moody Jr., 83, executed in Alabama.