A Black disabled Georgia man who was convicted nearly three decades ago for murdering his ex-girlfriend, among other crimes, was executed on Wednesday despite evidence that he was intellectually disabled.
In 2002, the Supreme Court ruled in Atkins v. Virginia that it is unconstitutional to execute intellectually disabled people.
Despite evidence that Willie Pye, 59, is intellectually disabled, he was still scheduled for execution, which his lawyers claim is because his public defender during his trial three decades ago was insufficient in proving his disability to the jury.
Pye was convicted and sentenced to death in 1996 for the kidnapping, robbery, rape and murder of his ex-girlfriend, Alicia Lynn Yarbrough, in November 1993. He was also sentenced to three terms of life imprisonment for kidnapping with bodily injury, armed robbery and rape, and 20 years’ imprisonment for burglary, according to court documents.
In late February, Spalding County Superior Court announced the scheduled date of Pye’s lethal injection.
In the weeks leading up to the execution, attorneys representing Pye attempted to delay or halt his execution through a series of court filings, according to the Union-Bulletin. On Tuesday, they asked Georgia’s Board of Pardons and Parole to grant clemency and issue a life sentence instead, stating that Pye’s public defender, Johnny Mostiler, during the trial “effectively abandoned his post, leaving no one and nothing, to stand between his client and death.”
“Had defense counsel not abdicated his role, the jurors would have learned that Mr. Pye is intellectually disabled and has an IQ of 68,” the lawyers wrote in a clemency application to the board. “They also would have learned the challenges he faced from birth—profound poverty, neglect, constant violence and chaos in his family home—foreclosed the possibility of healthy development. This is precisely the kind of evidence that supports a life sentence verdict.”
The board held a meeting a day before Pye’s scheduled execution “to receive information for or against clemency.”
“We just feel that there should be mercy granted. We have parole boards so that they have the opportunity to grant mercy when the law fails. And for Willie, the law has failed,” Cathy Harmon-Christian, executive director of Georgians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (GFADP), told HuffPost.
She continued: “We’re trying to stop it on the grounds that he is an intellectually disabled man, that there was tremendous racism and deprivation [in his life] … [and] there are too many procedural errors and problems in the original trial and beyond.”
GFADP delivered a petition, which received over 5,000 signatures, to the parole board on Tuesday in a last minute attempt to spare Pye’s life. But the efforts weren’t enough to alter his death sentence.
Following the meeting Tuesday, the parole board decided not to grant clemency. In a last ditch effort on the day the execution, Pye’s lawyers requested a stay, which was denied by both the Georgia Supreme Court and U.S. Supreme Court later that evening.
Pye appealed his death sentence multiple times in state and federal court, with his lawyers citing failures from Pye’s trial attorney during his trial in the mid-1990s and, more recently, claims that the execution was a violation of an agreement for the state to temporarily halt executions due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Witness testimonies and evidence presented in the mid-1990s trial led the jury to find that Pye and two others broke into the house of a man whom Yarbrough and her baby were living with at the time.
The three stole Yarbrough’s ring and necklace, kidnapped her and drove off, leaving the baby behind. They pulled onto a dirt road, where Pye forced Yarbrough to lay on the ground face down and shot her three times.
“There’s one thing that I fear more than anything else in this case, that if you give him life without parole, if he killed a woman on a dirt ― lonely, dirt road, that he loved, he’ll for sure kill a guard to get out,” the prosecutor told the jury, according to court documents. “He is going to be a danger to everybody around him until the day he is executed.”
According to court documents, Pye’s lawyers claimed that Mostiler failed to sufficiently investigate and present evidence of Pye’s traumatic childhood and adolescence, mental health problems and low intellectual functioning during the trial, as well as evidence to refute claims of possible future dangerousness that Pye poses. Billing records were also cited to show that Mostiler spent just over 150 hours preparing Pye’s case..
Investigator Dewey Yarbrough, who assisted Mostiler in Pye’s trial, testified that Mostiler did not obtain a psychological evaluation of Pye, according to court documents. But undisputed evidence was still provided to show that Pye has “low intellectual functioning, bordering on intellectual disability.” Dewey Yarbrough also said that he and Mostiler spent more time working on Pye’s case than what is reflected in the billing records.
Dewey Yarbrough added that Pye’s family members who were called to testify “didn’t put any effort forth on any of the contacts I made with them” and were unhelpful in proving Pye’s innocence. But some witnesses say they were called to testify for Pye on short notice, that they weren’t asked specific questions about Pye or his background, and were only told to say “nice” things about him, according to court documents.
In April 2021, a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided that Pye’s trial attorney failed to present sufficient evidence of Pye’s low intellectual functioning and traumatic childhood, and agreed to reverse his death sentence.
But last year, the case was reheard by the full federal appeals court and was overturned, effectively reinstating the original death sentence, according to Amnesty International.
The appeals court acknowledged that Pye’s attorney was insufficient in providing evidence about his low intellect and traumatic childhood, but said that they had to defer to the state court’s finding that the trial attorney did not prejudice Pye, per a requirement of a 1996 federal law. While Pye’s lawyers had shown that he has an intellectual disability, Amnesty International states that Georgia’s strict standard for proving an intellectual disability meant that Pye’s death sentence would remain.
In October, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Pye’s request to appeal, according to the Georgia attorney general’s office.
“The law is not good at dealing with complicated cases, particularly once the death penalty has been issued,” Harmon-Christian said. “It’s hard to pull that back, and a lot of that depends on the quality of the judges, and who’s appointed them and what their backgrounds are.”
After the execution date was scheduled, capital punishment opponents and disability advocates began advocating for Pye clemency, echoing arguments that were brought up in his appeals about his intellectual disability and other factors as reason for his life to be spared.
In a petition created on March 5 by GFADP, the organization pointed out how Pye’s life would have been spared if he were in any other state since the requirements for proving an intellectual disability are different in Georgia.
Despite being the first state to outlaw the execution of intellectually disabled people before the 2002 Supreme Court ruling, Georgia’s threshold for determining intellectual disabilities is hard to reach, meaning that executions of intellectually disabled people can still easily occur.
According to The New York Times, nearly every state in the U.S. proves an intellectual disability using “preponderance of evidence,” which requires a demonstration that it is more likely true than not true that the person is intellectually disabled.
But Georgia law has a requirement to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that they are intellectually disabled before someone can be declared ineligible for the death penalty. This requires that the person prove that there is a greater than 50% chance that the claim is true, according to Cornell University’s Legal Information Institute. The state’s juries determine whether a person is intellectually disabled at the time of sentencing, rather than in two separate processes like in other states.
Disability experts and death penalty opponents believe that Pye would have been ineligible for the death penalty if he had been tried in another state.
Research shows that no death penalty juries in Georgia have ever found a person who was convicted of murder to be intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for execution because of this high standard.
Dom Kelly, president of New Disabled South, explained to HuffPost that intellectual disabilities need to be considered thoroughly when deciding consequences for crimes, especially since people fundamentally don’t understand intellectual disabilities or the realities of intellectually disabled people who might not fully understand the ramifications of their choice.
“It doesn’t excuse what happened, it doesn’t excuse the life lost. But it definitely is something that needs to be considered when we’re thinking about what a consequence for an action looks like,” Kelly said.
Activists have been trying to push for legislation to change Georgia’s standard for proving an intellectual disability through HB 1014, which also calls for the addition of pretrial proceedings for determining an intellectual disability, but the bill has not advanced through this legislative session.
The First Georgia Execution In Four Years
Pye’s execution marks the first in Georgia in four years.
In January 2020, the state issued a judicial emergency due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which temporarily halted executions. During this time, people on death row could still become eligible for execution after exhausting their appeals.
Executions could only resume if three conditions were met: the state’s COVID-19 judicial emergency was lifted, normal visitation at state prisons resumed, and COVID vaccines were available to all members of the public, as outlined in an agreement reached by lawyers for people on death row and the state’s attorney general office April 2021.
The agreement would remain in place through Aug. 1, 2022, or a year after all of the three conditions were met, whichever came later. Last year, the state was accused of violating the contract after it obtained an execution order for a person on death row while the three conditions had not been met, The Associated Press reported.
In late February, the state obtained an execution order for Pye, whose lawyers filed a motion for him to join the litigation.
“We are beyond shocked and outraged by the fact that, in the midst of settlement discussions, the Attorney General’s office was simultaneously acting to pursue the execution of Willie Pye, one of our clients included in those talks, and doing so without informing us or the Court,” Nathan Potek, who represents death row prisoners for the Federal Defender Program, said, according to AP.
The state argued that Pye wasn’t exempt from execution while litigation over the agreement is pending since the agreement was “expressly limited to a small subgroup of death eligible inmates” that Pye was not a part of. A judge agreed with the state that Pye is not ineligible for execution.
Black People Are Disproportionately Sentenced To Death
Capital punishment has been criticized by many opponents for racial bias when it comes to who is sentenced to death.
A 2020 report from the Death Penalty Information Center found that people of color have been overrepresented on death row. According to the report, 52% of death row inmates in 2019 were Black. Racial discrimination has also been found to be present in jury selections of some capital cases.
In the petition to spare Pye’s life, death penalty opponents brought up his trial attorney’s notorious history involving claims of racial bias in the cases he represented, and how that may have impacted Pye’s sentencing.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, a national nonprofit that provides data and analysis on issues concerning capital punishment, Mostiler, who died in 2000, has been accused of having ineffective representation or a racial bias in multiple cases involving Black defendants, which raised alarm among activists who sought to spare Pye’s life.
Data shows that in Spalding County, Georgia, where Pye was tried and convicted, the death penalty was sought at a much higher rate than counties of comparable sizes ― and disproportionately against Black people.
“We unfortunately have seen more usage of the death penalty in that county in Georgia … because of the dehumanization of Black lives,” Kelly said. “And that’s not unique to Spalding County, but it is a statewide issue.”
The death penalty was reinstated in 1976, and in 1983 Georgia resumed executions, WRDW reported. There were 30 people executed in Georgia between 2010 and 2020. The death penalty is still used in 27 U.S. states, and the Legal Defense Fund found that about 1,582 people have been executed nationwide since 1976.
According to the Legal Defense Fund, there is no credible evidence that shows the death penalty deters crime. In the case of Pye, death penalty opponents and disability activists point out that he could remain in prison as part of his retribution.
“How does society heal from violence? How do we prevent violence and what is public safety really about? Execution does not answer any of that,” Harmon-Christian said.
She continued: “Executions can use the entire budget of a small community that could be used for many other things. That money could go towards victims. It could go towards their families…it could go towards so many other [things] other than just killing a person.”