After Four Years Without an Execution, Georgia Prepares to Kill Willie Pye

Five days before Georgia planned to kill Willie Pye by lethal injection, Assistant Federal Public Defender Nathan Potek stood before a U.S. district judge and made a final pitch to save his client. Everyone, even a man condemned to die, was entitled to equal protection under the law, Potek said. Yet his client was a member of a “disfavored class” thanks to discriminatory actions by the state. And it was about to cost him his life.

Pye was sentenced to die in 1996 for murdering his former girlfriend, Alicia Lynn Yarbrough. His conviction raised red flags, from Pye’s low IQ score to his trial attorney’s alleged racism toward his own clients. Yet Potek wasn’t arguing that Pye faced racial discrimination or that his sentence violated the Eighth Amendment ban on executing people with intellectual disabilities. As far as the law was concerned, those claims were null and void.

Instead, Potek proposed a novel argument. Of the 41 people on Georgia’s death row, Pye was one of several who had exhausted their appeals. Yet Pye alone faced imminent execution while the others were shielded by a legal agreement with the state that had placed executions on hold. “There is no meaningful difference” between Pye and these other men, Potek said.

In many ways, Pye’s predicament came down to bad timing. Georgia’s moratorium dated back to March 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic led the Georgia Supreme Court to declare a judicial emergency, halting executions. As months passed, death penalty lawyers became concerned over the growing number of clients whose cases were reaching their final appeals — and who would be hamstrung by restrictions on prison visitation that prevented their attorneys from preparing for clemency applications and late-stage litigation once executions restarted.

The eventual result was a written agreement in April 2021 between the Federal Defender Program in Atlanta and the Georgia Attorney General’s Office, which promised not to seek any new execution dates until the judicial emergency had been lifted, normal visitation had resumed, and the Covid vaccine had been made available to “all members of the public.”

Still, there was a catch: The agreement only applied to people whose appeals were exhausted during the judicial emergency, which was officially lifted in June 2021.

Today, the same visitation restrictions remain in place. The Georgia Department of Corrections does not allow as many visits as it did before the pandemic, which has “impaired counsel’s ability to … prepare for clemency proceedings and adequately represent their clients,” as the Georgia Supreme Court found. Yet Pye is not protected by the Covid-era contract. Because his appeals were exhausted in 2023, his execution will almost certainly move forward.

It was not long ago that Pye stood a good chance of getting off death row. As the federal defenders were negotiating the April 2021 agreement, a panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was considering a legal challenge alleging that Pye’s trial attorney had provided ineffective representation. It was a long shot; although Pye’s attorney had failed him in profound ways, the barriers standing in the way of relief are hard to overcome. But that same month, the panel vacated Pye’s death sentence, sending the case back for resentencing. It was rare for a federal court to intervene when it came to such a Sixth Amendment claim, the panel acknowledged. “This is one of those rare cases.”

Pye’s victory was short-lived. At the urging of the attorney general’s office, the full circuit court reversed the panel’s order the following year on procedural grounds. Whatever the failures of Pye’s trial lawyer, it ruled, under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, Pye was not entitled to relief after all.

If the reinstatement of Pye’s death sentence was devastating, there was an additional irony that proved especially cruel. Had the 11th Circuit simply rejected his appeal, Pye would have been protected by the agreement between the federal defenders and the state. Instead, the temporary relief led his case to fall through the cracks, placing him in line for execution. His trial lawyer’s failures had doomed him a second time.

With few good options, Pye’s lawyers challenged the looming execution using a civil rights claim ordinarily associated with class-action lawsuits. Under the 14th Amendment, Pye was entitled to equal protection under the law. By excluding Pye from the agreement, the state had created “a distinct, disfavored class of death row prisoners, one without the baseline guarantee of adequate representation,” Potek wrote in a federal court filing. This further violated Pye’s Fifth Amendment right to due process and deprived him of the fundamental right to life.

An oral argument on the matter was set for March 15 at the federal courthouse in Newnan, Georgia. Presiding over the hearing was Timothy Batten, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. A former trial attorney nominated by George W. Bush, Batten had presided over Pye’s federal appeals since 2013. He did not hide his skepticism of Potek’s argument.

“He’s already lost his right to life, right?” Batten asked. Potek conceded that while it was a lawful execution order, Pye was entitled to constitutional rights as long as he was still alive — and his disparate treatment ahead of his clemency hearing violated those rights. “I’m sure you would have cited it if there was any case in the country that was like this,” Batten said.

“Every card was stacked against him.”

Potek tried to impress upon the judge how hastily and opportunistically the state had moved to execute his client. As recently as late February, Pye’s lawyers were negotiating a potential settlement with the attorney general’s office to apply the Covid-era agreement to his case. But on February 27, lawyers for the attorney general abruptly ended the negotiations. Two days later, “with no notice,” the state obtained an execution order. Pye’s date was set for March 20 at 7 p.m. “They didn’t have to provide any notice, did they?” Batten said. “Not statutorily,” Potek said, but it was nonetheless “alarming” behavior. “That wasn’t alarming to me,” Batten replied bluntly. “So go on.”

The hearing lasted less than an hour. Pye’s argument was nothing more than a delay tactic, a lawyer for the attorney general’s office told the judge. “All of it is about more time to get ready for an execution he has known about for over 25 years.”

Outside the courtroom, anti-death penalty activist Cathy Harmon-Christian expressed dismay. The executive director of Georgians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, she was working to get word out about Pye’s case while organizing vigils for the night of the execution.

“There’s just so many problems with the case,” she said, none of which had been discussed at the hearing. And for all the ways in which the case was cast as unique, it was actually emblematic of problems that have plagued Georgia’s death penalty for generations. Pye’s trial attorney was not only ineffective. “He was a known racist,” Harmon-Christian said. “He spent very little time defending Willie.”

“Every card was stacked against him.”

The federal courthouse where the hearing took place is some 40 miles southwest of Atlanta, just off the historic town square in Newnan. The city has long boasted its claim as “the city of homes,” a nod to the antebellum architecture of its treasured old houses, a number of which survived the Civil War. A marble statue of a Confederate soldier still stands at the center of the original courthouse lawn. The memorial was vandalized in 2021, damaging the soldier’s musket. “It’s just there to piss off Black folks,” a county commissioner who proposed removing the statue told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “People are still fighting that war in their minds and in their hearts.”

The town of Griffin in neighboring Spalding County, where Pye was tried and convicted, moved its own Confederate monument to a cemetery in the 1960s, but local leaders have been loath to break with the past. In 2018, a video went viral of a former city commissioner repeatedly using the N-word while endorsing the designation of April as Confederate History and Heritage Month. The official, who was directing his comments at a Black commissioner, followed up by clarifying, “I don’t use that word anymore.”

Racism and the American death penalty have always been inextricable, particularly in the South, where historians have traced a line connecting slavery, lynchings, and executions. Georgia, whose earliest death penalty statutes applied to crimes committed by slaves or free people of color, has done more to shape the “modern” death penalty than perhaps any other state. It was a Georgia case that led to McCleskey v. Kemp, a Supreme Court ruling that insulated the death penalty from race-based legal challenges by forcing defendants to prove that racial bias had been intentional.

McCleskey was decided less than a decade before a jury dominated by white men sent Pye to death row. He was one of several Black men sentenced to death in Spalding County after being represented by Johnny Mostiler, a lawyer alleged to be openly racist toward his clients. In 2008, Georgia executed a man named Curtis Osborne despite allegations that Mostiler had repeatedly referred to him as a “little n–” who deserved to die. A lawyer who was briefly appointed to represent Osborne alongside Mostiler recalled a conversation in which Mostiler “said he thought young black men were lazy and asked me why I thought that was so.” In 2016, Kenneth Fults was executed despite accounts that Mostiler had slept through much of his trial — and despite statements from a juror who later said he was committed to voting for death “because that’s what that n– deserved.”

Mostiler, who died in 2000, was questioned by a trial judge about his use of racial slurs after one of his clients raised concerns. According to the transcript, Mostiler said that he did not “use those terms out in public.”

Colleagues and contemporaries of Mostiler’s have denied that he was racist against his clients. In a phone call, William McBroom, the former district attorney who tried both Pye and Fults, adamantly rejected the idea that racism infected the cases. “Johnny Mostiler did more for minorities in Spalding County than any other lawyer that I know of,” he said. Mostiler was always willing to give free legal advice, McBroom added. “I don’t see how he made a living until he got the public defender job.”

Whether Mostiler was motivated by prejudice or not, the record in Pye’s case reveals staggering failures. Pye was convicted after a three-day trial in which Mostiler called no witnesses apart from Pye himself. While he called several of Pye’s family members to testify at the sentencing stage, Mostiler failed to investigate and present crucial mitigating evidence that could have led the jury to spare his client’s life.

There is also reason to question the theory the state presented at trial. Pye’s previous appellate attorneys uncovered evidence showing that the star witness in the case — a teenager named Anthony Freeman, who agreed to testify against Pye as part of a plea deal — gave shifting accounts of the crime in the years leading up to Pye’s trial. Years after Pye was sentenced to die, Freeman told Pye’s attorneys that his testimony was coerced by the district attorney and law enforcement, who “made it clear that Willie Pye was the person they were after.”

In the early morning hours of November 16, 1993, a local farmer in Griffin went out to check on his livestock when he spotted a body lying on the dirt road. A sheriff’s deputy identified the body as Alicia Lynn Yarbrough, who was just short of her 21st birthday. She had been shot three times, the fatal shot tearing through her abdomen.

The mother of three young children, Yarbrough had struggled with addiction and abusive relationships. Police quickly zeroed in on her ex-boyfriend, 28-year-old Willie Pye, who was known to sell drugs around town. After hearing that police were looking for him, he went to the station to be interviewed the same day, telling investigators that he had not seen Yarbrough for about two weeks.

But this was a lie. As Pye would later admit, he’d seen Yarbrough the night before, at a local motel where he sometimes stayed under an alias. Pye had been hanging out that night with a man named Chester Adams and a teenager named Anthony Freeman. According to Pye, the pair dropped him off at the motel and later returned accompanied by Yarbrough. Although Pye and Yarbrough were no longer together, they still hooked up from time to time. Yarbrough had sex with all three of them that night in exchange for crack cocaine, Pye said. After that, she left with Adams and Freeman. Pye swore he never saw her again.

Adams was questioned on the same day as Pye. He denied his involvement but later pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to life. But Freeman, who was being held in jail on a separate charge, implicated both men and himself. Although he was 15, he was only in 8th grade and small for his age. “When I saw him, I thought he was about 12 years old,” one sheriff’s investigator later testified. Freeman said that Pye had gone to the house Yarbrough shared with another man, robbed it, and then forced Yarbrough to the motel, where all three of them raped her. Afterward, he said, Pye drove her to a field and shot her. On the basis of Freeman’s account, Pye was indicted for malice murder. Prosecutors announced they would seek the death penalty.

Representing Pye was 49-year-old Mostiler, Spalding County’s lone public defender. The chain-smoking, handlebar mustache-wearing son of a Georgia lawmaker, Mostiler “never conformed to the stereotype of the public defender,” as The American Prospect recounted in a lengthy profile published after his death. “Decked out in flashy jewelry and a black cowboy hat, he arrived at the Spalding Courthouse in a mustard green 1972 Cadillac El Dorado convertible.”

“We’ll enter pleas all week, at a rate of about 10 to 12 every 45 minutes.”

Mostiler had made a lucrative deal with the county to take over the entire indigent defense docket for a flat fee. The goal, he said, was to save money for the county. But for many of Mostiler’s clients, the result was life-ruining. His caseload was preposterous even without the addition of private clients. Spalding County had higher crime rates than many neighboring jurisdictions, and Mostiler was handling up to 900 cases a year. He solved this problem through a steady stream of guilty pleas.

“We’ll enter pleas all week, at a rate of about 10 to 12 every 45 minutes,” Mostiler told the Prospect. Many of the pleas came at the last minute, he added, since “defendants don’t get the fear of God in them ’til a trial is coming up.”

Pye refused to make a deal with the state. “I’m guilty of … not turning in what I know that night about Adams and Freeman bringing Alicia Yarbrough to my motel room,” he insisted on the stand. “But I never considered making no kind of deal because I did not commit no murder.”

Prosecuting the case was McBroom, Griffin’s judicial circuit district attorney, who had a reputation for aggressively seeking death sentences. In his first five years in office, McBroom sent five people to death row, including three of Mostiler’s clients. In his opening statement, McBroom laid out the evidence, along with Pye’s motive: He harbored a grudge against Yarbrough and her live-in boyfriend, Charles Puckett, because Yarbrough had recently given birth to a baby and Puckett signed the birth certificate. “Pye thinks it’s his child, and he’s mad about it,” McBroom said. Pye decided to rob the two, then raped and killed Yarbrough in a brutal act of vengeance.

The evidence against Pye was considerable. There was DNA from sperm matching Pye, along with witnesses who saw him with a distinctive .22 caliber gun that allegedly matched the bullets used to kill Yarbrough. But the case turned on the testimony of Freeman, the only one who claimed to have witnessed the murder. In convoluted testimony, he said that he, Pye, and Chester abducted Yarbrough from her home, gang raped her at the motel, drove around, and then returned to rape her again. Later, they drove Yarbrough to a cow pasture. “All of us got out. He told her to lay flat on the ground, face down, and he shot her.”

Pye was swiftly convicted and sentenced to die.

Pye arrived on death row as executions were peaking across the country. During his first decade at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison, the state killed 19 of his neighbors. Although executions have declined ever since, in the nearly 30 years Pye has spent on death row, 56 people have been put to death.

In the meantime, the Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision that might have allowed Pye to get off death row. In Atkins v. Virginia, the court ruled that executing people with intellectual disabilities was a violation of the Eighth Amendment. In a series of mental health evaluations, Pye’s post-conviction attorneys found that he had an IQ score of 68. But efforts to challenge his conviction on that basis were denied.

Post-conviction attorneys found that Pye had an IQ score of 68.

The question of Pye’s intellectual abilities was one of many things that Mostiler should have investigated before trial. But there was no record of a mental health evaluation or efforts to obtain Pye’s educational records.

The more Pye’s post-conviction attorneys learned about Mostiler’s work, the more disturbing it became. Despite his client’s insistence that he did not shoot Yarbrough, Mostiler did not appear to have investigated an alternate theory of the crime. The lawyers uncovered additional statements given by Freeman between his initial arrest in 1993 and Pye’s 1996 trial, which were never turned over to the defense. In one, given during a mental health evaluation, Freeman told a psychiatrist that he and Adams had picked up Yarbrough on the night in question, and she had gone with them willingly, later doing cocaine and having sex with them and Pye. The account echoed what Pye said at trial.

The lawyers also spoke to a friend and neighbor of Yarbrough’s, who said that on the night she was killed, Yarbrough came over to use the phone. “Lynn made some calls to a hotel and asked for Willie’s room,” the friend said. She assumed Yarbrough was asking to be picked up so that she could go get drugs.

Pye’s lawyers also collected dozens of affidavits from Pye’s relatives, neighbors, social workers, and others who filled in the harrowing details of his family history, which was marked by generational trauma, extreme poverty, and violence. Pye’s mother, Lolla Mae, was raised by her grandparents, who lived on a white man’s farm where her grandfather worked the land “in exchange for some of the food and a place for the family to stay.” By the time she was 8 years old, she picked peanuts and cotton alongside her siblings.

Pye’s father, who spent years working on a chain gang, was incarcerated when Pye was born. According to affidavits given to Pye’s attorneys, he drank heavily and beat his wife and kids. In one affidavit, a neighbor recalled seeing family fights spill outside. “You would see the boys attacking their father on the porch to get him away from their mother. … As the older boys grew up, they too began to drink heavily and that made the situation in the house more explosive.”

Uncovering evidence of family trauma is a critical component of any modern death penalty trial. Capital defense teams often include a mitigation specialist, who is tasked with investigating a client’s family history, particularly any evidence of abuse or neglect. But in the mid-1990s, most death penalty jurisdictions had not meaningfully incorporated such work into capital defense. In Spalding County, Mostiler handled death penalty cases without so much as a second attorney, let alone a mitigation specialist.

Billing records reviewed by Pye’s post-conviction attorneys showed a shocking lack of attention to the case. With the trial just weeks away, Mostiler had not yet pursued “a single lead provided by Mr. Pye,” the attorneys wrote in a petition challenging Pye’s conviction. “And it was not until five days before the scheduled start of jury selection that [Mostiler] began to identify mitigation witnesses.”

Pye’s case was described as “a shocking relic of the past.”

This work mostly fell to Mostiler’s investigator, a former cop named Dewey Yarbrough (no relation to Alicia). According to one of Pye’s sisters, Yarbrough asked her to think of good character witnesses for him. “It was short notice, but I tried,” she told Pye’s attorneys. In a deposition, Yarbrough estimated that he met with “maybe four” of Pye’s family members and “even tried to make arrangements” for them to attend the trial. But he did not find them particularly helpful. “I can remember thinking, and I want to say this was during, right before the sentencing phase, you know, I don’t care about going back over there and trying to get them here.”

Judge Jill Pryor, part of the original three-judge panel that vacated Pye’s death sentence, rejected Yarbrough’s characterization in a lengthy dissent to the 11th Circuit’s reversal. “The record unmistakably demonstrates that any failure to marshal family support … was due not to the family’s unwillingness to cooperate but rather to Mr. Yarbrough’s lack of care,” she wrote.

Yarbrough did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

McBroom vociferously denied withholding evidence from Pye’s defense, including the shifting statements from Freeman. “That’s a bunch of baloney,” he said. Besides, he added, the issue had been litigated and the courts upheld Pye’s conviction anyway. He rejected the notion that Freeman’s testimony had been coerced and defended his selection of a nearly all-white jury, pointing out that the victim was Black. “Race is not an issue in this case.”

As for Pye’s upbringing and concerns over insufficient mitigation, McBroom was unmoved. “The family was just a crime family,” he said. He knew plenty of people who grew up impoverished and abused and did not go on to commit murder. Finally, he dismissed the notion that Pye’s IQ should have precluded him from getting the death penalty. “The only intellectual disability he has is a condition called MAH — Mean as Hell.”

Barring any last-minute intervention, Pye, now 59, will die at 7 p.m. tonight.

Judge Timothy Batten denied Pye’s appeal a few hours after the hearing in Newnan. “While one might characterize Pye’s plight as unfair in relation to the few death row inmates covered by the agreement, it does not shock the conscience,” he wrote. Potek appealed to the 11th Circuit, which declined to grant a stay of execution.

On Tuesday, the Georgia Board of Pardon and Paroles held a clemency hearing for Pye. The board members have the sole authority to grant clemency — the governor cannot act alone. In a press release, the board rejected Pye’s appeal for mercy.

Clemency proceedings are closed to the public, but the Department of Corrections released the clemency application prepared by Pye’s attorneys. It called Pye’s case “a shocking relic of the past” and included letters from three jurors who sent him to death row but now oppose his execution. “Many of the jurors felt his attorney Johnny Mostiler did an inadequate job of defending him at trial,” one woman wrote. “It was a serious case but Mostiler could not have cared less.”

Another woman, who was the only Black member of the jury, said she wished jurors had heard about Pye’s background and cognitive impairments. “Mental health is so critical to why people behave the way they do,” she wrote. “How someone is raised matters.”

Through Cathy Harmon-Christian, the anti-death penalty activist, Pye’s relatives declined to be interviewed. According to the clemency petition, “Mr. Pye and his family were relieved and overjoyed” when the 11th Circuit briefly vacated his death sentence. Those who remain in touch with Pye described his positive impact on their lives and those of his neighbors on death row.

“I’ve spent 30 years or so in the prison visitation room with Uncle Will,” one niece wrote. “I’ve seen the way other inmates greet him with a smile, constantly introduce their visitors to him, and share with me how Uncle Will keeps them laughing and has been a source of hope and inspiration.”

“A child gets to a certain age where they need to know the story about what happened.”

Family members on the other side of the case feel differently about Pye. In a phone call, Alicia Yarbrough’s oldest daughter, Tawanna Bell, described how her mother’s murder impacted her and her siblings: “She got took away before she got a chance to even be a mom. Before she even got a chance to make memories with me.” Bell was just 5 years old and living with her grandmother when Yarbrough was killed. But it was her mom who did her hair and got her ready for her first day of school that fall. “She had me looking like a doll,” she said.

The murder devastated Yarbrough’s mother. Gernetta Starks, Bell’s cousin, said the crime “ate away” at her for the rest of her life. “When the police came to inform her that her daughter was murdered — the way she was murdered — the whole family had to console her,” she said. Now Pye’s looming execution was opening old wounds. For Bell, seeing the case back in the news has revealed horrific details of her mother’s murder that she’d never heard before. “I feel like they didn’t explain a lot of stuff to the kids because they wanted to protect them,” Starks said. “But a child gets to a certain age where they need to know the story about what happened.”

Although they support Pye’s execution, both women said his death sentence has done little to ease the trauma the family has lived with for 30 years. A few years ago, Starks launched an advocacy organization inspired by Yarbrough called When She Survives, which seeks to help victims of domestic violence and provide the kind of support they never received. Bell plans to witness the execution alongside her siblings. But she does not expect it to heal her pain.

“We are a forgiving family. But how do you forgive somebody that simply didn’t have any regard for your family member?”

Update: March 21, 2024
Willie Pye was executed by lethal injection on March 20 and pronounced dead at 11:03 p.m. He was 59 years old.

The post After Four Years Without an Execution, Georgia Prepares to Kill Willie Pye appeared first on The Intercept.