Capital punishment opponents launched a petition on Tuesday to halt the execution of a Black, disabled Georgia man who was convicted of murder nearly 30 years ago.
Willie Pye, 59, is scheduled to receive a lethal injection on March 20 at 7 p.m. for the November 1993 killing of his ex-girlfriend Alicia Lynn Yarbrough, a judge announced last Thursday.
Georgians For Alternatives to the Death Penalty, an organization working to end capital punishment, launched a petition this week to stop Pye’s execution, citing his intellectual disability. The petition states that the U.S. Constitution prohibits the execution of intellectually disabled people, but Georgia is the only state in the country that requires proof of intellectual disability “beyond a reasonable doubt” before they can be declared ineligible for the death penalty.
According to The New York Times, Georgia’s standard for proving an intellectual disability is intended to be hard to meet and, in the context of prosecutions, meant to let some guilty people go free to avoid the risk of sending innocent people to prison. Every other state in the U.S. uses ‘preponderance of evidence’ — showing that it is more likely than not — as a standard for proving an intellectual disability.
“This is an unattainable standard,” the petition wrote. “Had Willie Pye been tried in a state that uses ‘preponderance of evidence’ as a standard of proof, he would have been ineligible for the death penalty.”
The petition also claimed that Spalding County, where Willie was tried and convicted almost 30 years ago, pursued the death penalty at a higher rate than counties of similar sizes and disproportionately against Black people.
It went on to highlight how, during Pye’s trial, the jury didn’t get to hear about Pye’s deeply traumatic childhood, intellectual disability, the racism in the community he was raised in or how he’s been non-violent throughout the decades he’s been in prison. Pye’s lawyers had made similar arguments for years, claiming that his trial attorney failed to do a sufficient investigation into Pye’s “life, background, physical and psychiatric health” as a way to prevent mitigating evidence to the jury during sentencing, Georgia Public Broadcasting reported.
In one day, the petition garnered over 1,400 signatures, as well as the support of organizations such as Death Penalty Action and New Disabled South.
According to a press release from the Georgia attorney general’s office, Pye and two other people broke into the home of a man whom Yarbrough was living with at the time with the intention to rob him. The three found Yarbrough in the house with her baby, stole her ring and necklace and abducted her, leaving the baby behind.
Pye and his two companions drove off with Yarbrough and pulled over on a dirt road, where Pye ordered his ex-girlfriend to lie face down and shot her three times. On June 6, 1996, Pye was found guilty by a jury on counts of malice murder, kidnapping with bodily injury, armed robbery, burglary and rape.
The execution scheduled for later in March will be the first in Georgia since January 2020, following its temporary halt on executions as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, Georgia Public Broadcasting reported.