A 67-year-old former Sampson County man should be able to breathe a sigh of relief this week after N.C. Gov. Roy Cooper commuted the death penalty portion of his murder conviction just before leaving office.

Iziah Barden, who has been on North Carolina’s death row since 1999, was among 15 individuals whose death penalty sentences were commuted by Cooper Tuesday.

A Sampson County jury found Barden guilty of first-degree murder in November 1999. He had been charged with the beating death of then 23-year-old Felipe Resendiz, found dead on March 28, 1998 at the Master Casings Plant, which at that time was located on East Butler Avenue in Clinton. Resendiz had been working alone at the plant at the time of his death. When his body was discovered, officers noted that he died after being hit in the head more than 10 times with a blunt object.

Barden was the only Sampson County man among the 15.

Cooper’s 15 commutations account for 11 percent of the 136 people who had been on North Carolina’s death row. Eleven of the 15 individuals were clients of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, a Durham-based group who opposed the death penalty. It was unclear whether Barden was among those 11 clients.

“These reviews are among the most difficult decisions a governor can make, and the death penalty is the most severe sentence that the state can impose,” Cooper wrote in a prepared statement. “After thorough review, reflection and prayer, I concluded that the death sentence imposed on these 15 people should be commuted, while ensuring they will spend the rest of their lives in prison.”

Barden has been on death row since his November 1999 conviction.

At trial, the state presented a case which depicted Barden as a man who was looking drugs and sought money from the victim in order to obtain those drugs.

During the trial, which lasted less than a week, an investigator from the State Bureua of Investigation read a statement given by Barden shortly after the murder which detailed his confession.

In that confession, Barden admitted going back to the Master Casings plant where both he and Resendiz worked, finding Resendiz and beating him 14 times in the back of the head and neck with a sledgehammer.

In the confession, Barden acknowledged that he and another man had gone out on March 28 in search of crack cocaine and had stopped at the plant for Barden to ask Resendiz to loan him some money for the potential drug buy.

Barden, the SBI agent testified in 1999, said when he asked the victim for money, he spoke a few words in Spanish followed by the word “black,” words Barden took to be a racial slur. He also said Resendiz slapped him.

While the victim’s head was turned, Barden spotted the sledgehammer, picked it up and began delivering blows to the victim, four at the time, until he fell to the ground. The convicted murderer’s statement noted that once Resendiz fell to the ground he continued to strike him, four or five more times. As the victim lay dying, Barden grabbed a wallet from his pocket, went to the locker room to wash the blood off his hands and change out of his bloody clothes.

The jury took less than an hour to find Barden guilty of first-degree murder, and, later in the week, the jury decided the weight of his actions warranted the death penalty.