Willie Pye from death row executed in Georgia for 1993 Alicia Lynn Yarbrough murder

Willie Pye, a convicted death row inmate, was executed by the state of Georgia on Wednesday. This marks the first execution in more than four years in the state, and was carried out by lethal injection at a prison in Jackson. Pye, 59, was sentenced to death for the 1993 murder of Alicia Lynn Yarbrough. The execution proceeded despite the final appeals by Pye and his attorneys, who had argued that he should be spared due to his intellectual disability, a troubled upbringing, and ineffective assistance of counsel.

Nathan Potek, Pye’s attorney, emphatically stated post execution that the conviction was obtained after the state provided Pye with a racist and incompetent defense attorney. Potek also argued that Pye’s lifelong intellectual disability and the lack of danger he posed while in prison should have warranted sparing his life. However, the Georgia Supreme Court disagreed and rejected Pye’s appeals.

Pye was convicted in 1996 of several charges related to the murder of Yarbrough. Notably, his last-minute appeals argued that his execution violated an agreement made during the Covid-19 pandemic between the Georgia Attorney General’s Office and capital defense lawyers, pausing executions in the state until certain conditions were met. Furthermore, Pye’s attorneys argued that his exclusion from this agreement put him in a “disfavored class” of death row inmates, a violation of the equal protection and due process clauses of the 14th amendment.

The execution involved the grisly 1993 murder of Yarbrough, with whom Pye had an intermittent romantic relationship. He, along with two accomplices, planned to rob a man who lived with Yarbrough, out of anger the man had signed the birth certificate of a child whom Pye claimed was his. The robbery escalated to kidnapping, rape, and the murder of Yarbrough, with Pye’s accomplices testifying as state witnesses against him.

Pye’s pleas for clemency cited the ineffective assistance of his trial attorney, who reportedly was responsible for all indigent defense services in Spalding County, Georgia at the time. The petition states that the attorney was handling several other high-profile cases, causing him to “abandon his post.” Pye also emphasized his intellectual disability, with an IQ of 68, which his defense argued should legally prevent his execution. Despite these arguments, all state and federal appeals courts upheld Pye’s convictions and sentence. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals initially vacated his sentence in 2021 but overturned this decision a year later.