UDPATE march 22. 2024
he state of Georgia on Wednesday executed death row inmate Willie Pye, who was convicted and sentenced to die for the 1993 murder of Alicia Lynn Yarbrough.
The execution – Georgia’s first in more than four years – was carried out by lethal injection at 11:03 p.m. at a prison in Jackson, about 50 miles south of Atlanta, the Georgia Department of Corrections said in a news release. Pye did not make a final statement, it said.
Pye, 59, was put to death after the US Supreme Court denied his final appeals late Wednesday. In a clemency petition and various court filings, Pye and his attorneys had argued for his life to be spared, citing an intellectual disability, a troubled upbringing and ineffective assistance of counsel.
“The State of Georgia obtained Willie’s death sentence only after providing him a racist and incompetent defense attorney. And the State has insisted on standing by that death sentence in spite of his lifelong intellectual disability and the fact that he presents a danger to no one in prison,” his attorney, Nathan Potek, said after the execution.
“The people of Georgia deserve better,” he added, describing Pye as a loving son, brother and uncle who “will be dearly missed by his friends, family, and his legal team.”
March 7, 2024
The Georgia Attorney General has announced that Willie James Pye, who previously had his death sentence reversed due to his attorney’s failure to investigate his background, only to see the death sentence reinstated on appeal, is set to be executed on March 20. Mr. Pye’s court-appointed trial attorney, Johnny Mostiler, has been accused of ineffective representation or racial bias in at least four cases involving Black defendants and reportedly called one of his own clients a “little n****r.” Mr. Pye has also exhibited “undisputed” signs of intellectual disability, with an IQ of 68 and a history of learning difficulties. Georgia has not conducted an execution in over four years, and Mr. Pye is the state’s first scheduled execution date in about two years.
Mr. Pye was convicted and sentenced to death in 1996 for the kidnapping, robbery, rape, and murder of his ex-girlfriend Alicia Yarbrough. At the time, Mr. Mostiler had a lump-sum deal with Spalding County to represent the entire indigent criminal caseload, which numbered some 800 felony and five capital cases. He also had an active private civil practice. Mr. Mostiler only spent about 150 hours on Mr. Pye’s case, including the trial itself, while studies have found that thousands of hours are typically required for effective capital defense representation. He also spent less than five hours preparing the case for a life sentence, most of it on the day of the penalty phase and the day before. Due to his limited investigation, he did not uncover evidence of Mr. Pye’s traumatic upbringing and intellectual disability. Mr. Pye grew up experiencing “near-constant physical and emotional abuse, extreme parental neglect, endangerment, and abject poverty.” He battled severe depressive episodes and reported hearing voices prior to the killing. However, Mr. Mostiler relied on Mr. Pye’s sister to recruit family members as witnesses and told them only to testify to Mr. Pye’s good character, without delving into the difficulties of Mr. Pye’s childhood. He did not request an evaluation of Mr. Pye’s intellectual functioning or develop evidence regarding the claim even after the state expert tested Mr. Pye’s IQ at 68, in the impairment range.
At least three of Mr. Mostiler’s clients have been executed, including Kenneth Fults and Curtis Osborne; Mr. Mostiler infamously slept through portions of Mr. Fults’ trial, and he told a white client that he would spend much more money on his case than on Mr. Osborne’s because “that little n****r deserves the chair.” In Frederick Whatley’s case, Mr. Mostiler allowed the prosecution to force Mr. Whatley to reenact the murder while shackled in manacles and leg irons. Justice Sonia Sotomayor later wrote that it was “hard to imagine a more prejudicial example of needless shackling.” A 2001 profile of Mr. Mostiler following his death found that he had handled “more than seven times the number of indigent cases the American Bar Association (ABA) believes is manageable…turning over one case every 100 minutes, less time than a private attorney might devote to a simple traffic violation.” The profile called him the “archetype” of “meet ’em, greet ’em, and plead ’em” lawyers.
In 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit overturned Mr. Pye’s death sentence, unanimously finding that Mr. Mostiler failed to investigate and present a broad range of available mitigating and rebuttal evidence. The panel did not reach the merits of Mr. Pye’s intellectual disability claim, writing that the ineffective assistance claim was sufficient to require a new sentencing trial, but highlighted substantial evidence of Mr. Pye’s low cognitive functioning. However, on the state’s motion, the Eleventh Circuit reconvened en banc (with the full court) and reinstated Mr. Pye’s death sentence. The court acknowledged that Mr. Mostiler’s performance was deficient, but held that it was required under the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) to defer to the state court’s finding that Mr. Mostiler’s performance did not prejudice Mr. Pye. The majority interpreted AEDPA and Supreme Court precedent to conclude that even if the state court’s decision rests on clear errors, federal courts must defer to that decision if there are “additional rationales” that support it. In other words, the federal reviewing court may theorize reasons for the state court’s outcome and adopt those reasons to justify a state court decision that is otherwise wrong on the facts or the law.
Willie James Pye v. Warden, Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison (US COURT OF APPEALS) 2021
wo judges dissented in full, while two additional judges joined the dissent in part but concurred in the judgment. Dissenting Judge Jill Pryor wrote that the majority had directly violated Supreme Court precedent by “turning to justifications the state never even hinted at” and relying on “a half-baked textual analysis” in support. She further argued that the holding “creates a practically impossible path to relief for habeas petitioners…[i]f federal courts can bury unreasonable findings under an avalanche of new reasons the state court never gave, then unreasonable findings will virtually never be important enough to satisfy the majority’s test.”
Judge Pryor also noted the “undisputed evidence” of Mr. Pye’s low intellectual functioning. Supreme Court jurisprudence and scientific research recognize IQ scores below 70 as a strong, often definitive indicator of intellectual disability. Georgia has one of the lowest appellate success rates of intellectual disability claims by capital defendants, with an 11% success rate compared to 82% in neighboring North Carolina. Georgia is also the only state that requires defendants to prove their intellectual disability “beyond a reasonable doubt” at trial, and a 2017 study found that only one defendant had ever been found exempt from the death penalty on these grounds in three decades. Research shows that states that significantly deviate from accepted clinical standards, including Georgia, are much less likely to exempt defendants from the death penalty based on intellectual disability.
Judge Pryor concluded that under the majority’s ruling, the “writ of habeas corpus is illusory—impossible, even, to obtain.” She wrote that as the author of the panel opinion, reading the full court’s opinion made her feel like she had “stepped through the looking glass.” However, “what happened during Alice’s time through the looking glass was a dream…This case, unfortunately, is not.”
Survivor on Death Row, a new e-book co-authored by death row inmate Romell Broom and Clare Nonhebel, tells the story of Ohio‘s botched attempt to execute Broom by lethal injection in 2009. In September of that year, Broom was readied for execution and placed on the gurney, but the procedure was terminated after corrections officials spent over two hours attempting to find a suitable vein for the lethal injection. Broom was removed from the death chamber and has remained on death row ever since. In the book, Broom discusses his troubled childhood and his life of over 25 years on death row, including his repeated requests for new DNA testing and a new legal team. Broom has always maintained his innocence. Jon Snow, a reporter for Channel 4 News in England, called the book “A horrifying story embracing all the evils of the death penalty. Bad forensics, dodgy DNA, awful lawyers, render this a must-read.”
A new book by Larry Koch, Colin Wark and John Galliher discusses the status of the death penalty in the U.S. in light of recent legislative activity and court decisions. In The Death of the American Death Penalty, the authors examine the impact of factors such as economic conditions, public sentiment, the role of elites, the media, and population diversity on the death penalty debate. The book highlights the recent abolition decisions in New York, New Jersey, New Mexico, and Illinois, and the surprising decline of the death penalty even in the deep South. James R. Acker, Distinguished Teaching Professor in Criminal Justice at the University at Albany, said, “Support for capital punishment in this country, as measured by the laws authorizing it, prosecutors’ enthusiasm for seeking it, jury verdicts that dispatch it, and executioners’ final deliverance, has eroded rapidly in recent years. A decade after the publication of its predecessor and carrying on in that volume’s fine tradition, The Death of the American Death Penalty provides detailed explanations—the where, how, and why—of these dramatic developments in death penalty laws and practices.”
Long-time death penalty scholar Hugo Adam Bedau died on August 13, 2012 . Dr. Bedau had been the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University, and is best known for his work on capital punishment. Dr. Bedau frequently testified about the death penalty before the U.S. Congress and many state legislatures. He authored several books about the death penalty, including The Death Penalty in America (1964; 4th edition, 1997), The Courts, the Constitution, and Capital Punishment (1977), Death is Different (1987), and Killing as Punishment (2004), and co-authored In Spite of Innocence (1992). This last book, written with Prof. Michael Radelet of the University of Colorado and Constance Putnam (Dr. Bedau’s wife), contained one of the best early collections of people who had been wrongly convicted in death penalty cases. In 1997, Bedau received the August Vollmer Award of the American Society of Criminology, and in 2003 he received the Roger Baldwin Award from the ACLU of Massachusetts. Dr. Bedau was a founding member of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
A new book by Professors Saundra Westervelt and Kimberly Cook looks at the lives of eighteen people who had been wrongfully sentenced to death and who were later freed from death row. In Life After Death Row: Exonerees’ Search for Community and Identity, the authors focus on three central areas affecting those who had to begin a new life after leaving years of severe confinement: the seeming invisibility of these individuals after their release; the complicity of the justice system in allowing that invisibility; and the need for each of them to confront their personal trauma. C. Ronald Huff, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, noted, “The authors skillfully conduct a journey inside the minds of exonerees, allowing readers to see the world from their unique perspectives.”
A new electronic book by former journalist Peter Rooney offers an in-depth look at the case of Joseph Burrows, who was exonerated fromIllinois’s death row in 1996. In Die Free: A True Story of Murder, Betrayal and Miscarried Justice, Rooney explains how Burrows was sentenced to death for the murder of William Dulin based on snitch testimony. He was convicted primarily on the word of Gayle Potter, who recanted her testimony eight years later and admitted to committing the crime herself. According to one review, “Rooney makes it clear his book Die Free isn’t an argument against the death penalty, but simply another example of why such an extreme punishment should be re-evaluated. His points are made clearly and with merit as he details obvious evidence withholding by an over-aggressive district attorney, threats and intimidation of a borderline mentally challenged man, and the old school thoughts of little women versus big, burly men.” Rooney is a former staff writer for the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette and is currently the director of public affairs at Amherst College. Joe Burrows died at age 56 in 2009. This case, and similar exonerations, led to the abolition of the death penalty in Illinois in 2011. The book is available for 
A new book by Clive Stafford Smith, a British lawyer who has defended death row inmates in the U.S., offers an in-depth view of capital punishment in America. In Injustice: Life and Death in the Courtrooms of America, Stafford Smith examines the case of Kris Maharaj, a British citizen who was sentenced to death in Florida for a double murder, to expose problems in the justice system. The book reveals disturbing details of Maharaj’s case, including anomalies in the prosecution files–witnesses with exculpatory testimony who were never called, falsified and suppressed evidence, and reports that a witness to the shootings failed a lie detector test. Maharaj’s death sentence was later commuted to life without parole. Stafford Smith is the Legal Director of Reprieve, which provides legal assistance in death penalty cases. In 2005 he received the Gandhi International Peace Award. He was a founder of the Louisiana Crisis Assistance Center, defending death row inmates in that state.
American Bar Association recently published The State of Criminal Justice 2012, an annual report that examines major issues, trends and significant changes in America’s criminal justice system. This publication serves as a valuable resource for academics, students, and policy-makers in the area of criminal justice, and contains 24 chapters focusing on specific areas of the criminal justice field. The chapter devoted to capital punishment was written by Ronald Tabak, special counsel and pro bono coordinator at Skadden Arps. Tabak addresses the decline in the use of the death penalty, the geographic, racial and economic disparities in implementing capital punishment, important Supreme Court decisions, and other issues such as the continuing risk of wrongful executions. In concluding, he writes, “Ultimately, our society must decide whether to continue with a system that has been found in study after study, and has been recognized by a growing number of leading judges, to be far more expensive than the actual alternative – in which life without parole is the most serious punishment. In view of the lack of persuasive evidence of societal benefits from capital punishment, this is one ineffectual, wasteful government program whose elimination deserves serious consideration.”
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