ATLANTA — A Georgia man convicted of killing his former girlfriend three decades ago is scheduled to be put to death Wednesday in what would be the state’s first execution in more than four years.
Willie James Pye, 59, was convicted of murder and other crimes in the November 1993 killing of Alicia Lynn Yarbrough. The planned lethal injection using the sedative pentobarbital is set to happen at 7 p.m. at the state prison in Jackson.
In their request for clemency, Pye’s lawyers called the 1996 trial “a shocking relic of the past” and said the local public defender system had severe shortcomings in the 1990s.
The failures of the local justice system had the effect of “turning accused defendants into convicted felons with all the efficiency of Henry Ford’s assembly line,” Pye’s defense lawyers wrote in their clemency application.
“Had defense counsel not abdicated his role, the jurors would have learned that Mr. Pye is intellectually disabled and has an IQ of 68,” they said, citing the findings of the state’s expert.
Defendants who are intellectually disabled are ineligible for execution. Experts said that Pye meets the criteria, but that the burden of proof in Georgia was too high to reach, his lawyers argued.
“They also would have learned the challenges he faced from birth — profound poverty, neglect, constant violence and chaos in his family home — foreclosed the possibility of healthy development,” they wrote. “This is precisely the kind of evidence that supports a life sentence verdict.”
But the Georgia Parole Board rejected those arguments after a closed-door meeting on Tuesday, and denied Pye’s bid for clemency.
Pye had been in an on-and-off romantic relationship with Yarbrough, but at the time she was killed Yarbrough was living with another man. Pye, Chester Adams and a 15-year-old had planned to rob that man and bought a handgun before heading to a party in a nearby town, prosecutors have said.
The trio left the party around…
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