26-03-2025
One Year After Controversial Execution, Georgia Looks to Reform Death Penalty Laws
Georgia made national headlines last year when the state executed Willie James Pye, a man who multiple expert witnesses had deemed intellectually disabled. Pye and two other people had been convicted of the 1996 murder, kidnapping, rape, and robbery of his ex-girlfriend, Alicia Yarbrough, in Spaulding County.
Anti-death penalty advocates worked diligently to get Pye off death row, and they almost succeeded. After his attorney's competence was called into question, Pye's death sentence was reversed, only to be reinstated by an appellate court. He was executed by lethal injection on March 20, 2024.
One year after Pye's execution, Georgia advocates are hopeful that a bill making its way through the State Legislature can reform the way intellectual disability is handled in death penalty cases.
'It's almost a little bittersweet knowing that had the standard been [different], that might well have prevented the execution of Willie Pye,' said Nathan Potek, Pye's attorney through the Federal Defender Program.
House Bill 123 would align Georgia with the other 26 states that practice capital punishment. Under current state law, a defendant must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they are intellectually disabled; the decision is made by a jury at the same time as those jurors decide the defendant's guilt or innocence. The new bill, which is currently awaiting approval by the senate judiciary committee, would require that intellectual disability be determined in a pretrial hearing and set a lower threshold for proving it.
Black people are overrepresented on death rows nationally; in Georgia, Black residents make up one-third of the state's overall population but 44% of all people currently on death row. Ten people on death row have been convicted in metro Atlanta, four in Fulton County, four in Cobb County, and one in Gwinnett County. Seven of them were Black.
'There's a lot of historical racial terror implications built within and baked into the death penalty system in America,' said Joia Thornton, founder and national director of the Faith Leaders of Color Coalition, a nonprofit that organizes with Black and Indigenous clergy who are working to end the American death penalty system.
Though race is a component to any criminal justice reform conversation, advocates for this bill, like Wesley Myrick, executive director at the Georgia Interfaith Public Policy Center, chose not to make it central to their work.
'This bill does not seek to resolve any conversations related to the death penalty and race — it is simply not topical,' Myrick said. 'Rather, this bill is about our shared obligation to love and protect our neighbors with intellectual disabilities to ensure they are treated compassionately through our adjudication processes and in a manner that honors their humanity above all.'
While the bill is limited in its scope — Georgia has tried 90 death penalty cases since 2015 but only 10 have had intellectual disability claims — advocates believe it would be an important step in the right direction.
'If we as a society have determined that it's wrong to execute folks with intellectual disability, then we should make sure that we aren't doing that,' Potek said.
In 1988, Georgia became the first state to ban the execution of intellectually disabled people. The law was passed more than a decade before the Supreme Court made its 2002 ruling in Atkins v. Virginia, finding that it was a violation of the 'cruel and unusual punishment' clause in the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution to execute a person with an intellectual disability.
Though Georgia's legislation was ahead of its time, critics say the law is ineffective. Since it was adopted, no one has been declared intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for execution, according to the Southern Center for Human Rights.
Critics of the law have been working to change it for years. Myrick said their relative success this year has been due to the interest of the speaker of the house and the support of the majority party, which he described as dedicated to ensuring that persons with disabilities are protected.
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