Georgia Resumes Executions

In 1993, Alicia Lynn Yarbrough died in a nightmare scenario. The ex-boyfriend who wouldn’t go away broke into her home with two accomplices and abducted her at gunpoint, leaving her baby unattended in the house. The three men later gang-raped her, forced her back into the car, and drove to another location. Willie James Pye then forced her to lie face down and shot her three times. There is no doubt of guilt. The accomplice’s confession is confirmed by DNA. Long overdue justice was finally carried out last night, the first execution in Georgia since the pandemic.

Atlanta News First has this story:

Family members of Yarbrough spoke exclusively with Atlanta News First ahead of the execution.

“It took us 30 years to get to this point and I think the main focus for us we wanted the world to know that she was somebody. You know the whole time, the whole 30 years, the focus has been on Pye and it hasn’t been on Alicia and it’s not fair. Her children got lost in all of this,” Alicia’s cousin Gernetta Starks said.

Atlanta News First also spoke to Yarbrough’s daughter, Tawanna Bell who told us that this gave her a sense of “closure for the first time in her life, since the murder.”

Unfortunately, the video of ANF’s interview with the family on that page has been replaced with a later report of the execution itself.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s orders denying a stay and review of the case are here and here. No dissent is noted.

Pye’s lawyers claimed that he is intellectually disabled and thus exempt from execution under the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Atkins v. Virginia. The problem with that claim, insufficiently reported in the press coverage, is that the Georgia court held a full hearing with expert testimony on both sides and found that it was not true.

In the landmark 1987 case of McCleskey v. Kemp, Georgia was accused of discriminatorily seeking the death penalty more often when a white person was the victim, an accusation fully tried and found to be false by the federal district court. See this article. Justice Brennan protested that “diminished willingness to render [a death] sentence when blacks are victims, reflects a devaluation of the lives of black persons.”  So one would think it is newsworthy that Pye was executed for killing a black victim, but no. It took some digging to confirm that fact. The AP story has big picture of the killer at the top but none of the victim. The story does report the claim of Pye’s present lawyers that the trial lawyer — now conveniently deceased and unable to defend himself — was a racist.