Intellectually Disabled Georgia Prisoner Executed After SCOTUS Denies Appeal
Georgia executed Willie Pye, 59, on March 20, 2024, despite last-minute appeals questioning his mental competency and the adequacy of his legal representation. The execution sharpened debate over capital punishment in the treatment of intellectually disabled prisoners.
Pye was convicted of the 1993 murder of former girlfriend Alicia Lynn Yarbrough. After admitting that another man fathered the child Pye believed was his, he and three accomplices abducted and raped her before taking her to a deserted road where Pye ordered her to lie face down and shot her three times. He maintained his innocence but received a death sentence plus three life sentences.
In the clemency petition they filed for him, his attorneys noted his intellectual disability, a factor the Supreme Court of the U.S. (SCOTUS) has found sufficient to halt executions, though Georgia’s standard to prove this presented an “insurmountably high” burden, they said. They also contended that his overworked trial attorney failed to present mitigating evidence, including Pye’s low IQ and troubled upbringing.
Pye’s defense attorney at the time of his trial was responsible for all indigent defense services in Spalding County under a lump-sum contract. In 1996, the year he lost the case for Pye, the lawyer was responsible for hundreds of county felony cases in addition to his private practice case load. He also represented defendants in four other capital cases. The clemency petition alleged that this made Pye’s defense counsel inadequate, arguing that the attorney “effectively abandoned his post.”
The petition claimed that if his overwhelmed attorney had provided Pye adequate representation, jurors “would have learned that Mr. Pye is intellectually disabled and has an IQ of 68, well below the 100 average.” They also would have heard about other challenges he faced “from birth,” including “profound poverty, neglect, constant violence, and chaos in his family home” which effectively “foreclosed the possibility of [his] healthy development.”
After the Georgia parole board denied clemency, Pye’s legal team filed last-minute appeals, including one challenging his exclusion from a pandemic-era agreement pausing executions. SCOTUS then declined without explanation to rehear his case on the day he was killed. See: Pye v. Oliver, 144 S. Ct. 1090 (2024). That left Pye to become the 54th Georgia prisoner put to death by lethal injection since SCOTUS reinstated the death penalty in 1976; in that time, the state DOC has executed 75 men and one woman. Georgia last murdered a prisoner in January 2020, executing Donnie Cleveland Lance, 66, for the 1997 slaying of his ex-wife, Sabrina “Joy” Lance, 39, and her boyfriend, Dwight “Butch” Wood Jr., 33.
Sources: CNN, USA Today
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