Georgia is set to hold its first execution after 4-year pause

WSBTV.com News Staff
·4 min read

Georgia Department of Corrections officials announced that a man convicted of kidnapping, rape, robbery and murder will be executed on March 20.

Willie James Pye, from Spalding County, was convicted for the 1992 murder of his ex-girlfriend, Alicia Lynn Yarbrough.

According to court documents, Pye had been in an on-again-off-again relationship with Yarbrough. At the time of her murder, she was living with another man, Charles Puckett.

At the time, officials said Pye and two of his friends planned to rob Puckett because he had collected money from the settlement of a lawsuit. Pye was also angry because officials said Puckett had signed the birth certificate of a child whom Pye claimed was his.

The three men then drove to Griffin, where officials said Pye bought a large pistol and then went to a party. Witnesses told the court they heard Pye say as he left, “It’s time, let’s do it.” Then, the witness said all three men wore ski masks and gloves.

Court documents said as the men approached Puckett’s house, they saw that Yarbrough and her baby were the only ones home. When Pye tried to open a window, officials said Yarbrough saw him and screamed. He then ran around to the front door, kicked it in, and held her at gunpoint.

After the men realized there was no money in the house, court records said they took a ring and a necklace from Yarbrough and abducted her, leaving the baby in the house. Officials said the men then drove to a nearby motel where Pye rented a room using an alias.

Once in the room, officials said the men raped Yarbrough at gunpoint.

Officials said the four then left the motel room and drove onto a dirt road where Pye shot and killed Yarbrough.

Police later recovered several items Pye left behind near Yarbrough’s body, linking him to the crime, court documents said.

Pye was indicted in 1994 for malice murder, felony murder, kidnapping with bodily injury, armed robbery, burglary, rape and aggravated sodomy. His trial began in 1996 where the jury found him guilty on all counts except felony murder and aggravated sodomy.

Since being convicted, Pye has tried multiple times to appeal his conviction, however the Georgia Supreme Court denied each appeal.

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Executions in Georgia stopped in 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic. But court proceedings continued, meaning people on death row continued to become eligible for execution as they exhausted their appeals.

In early 2021, a committee of a judicial task force on COVID instructed lawyers for death row prisoners and the state attorney general’s office to determine terms under which executions could resume. After negotiations, they entered into the agreement in April 2021.

Executions would not restart until six months after three conditions had been met, according to the agreement: the expiration of the state’s COVID-19 judicial emergency, the resumption of normal visitation at state prisons and the availability of a COVID vaccine “to all members of the public.” It also set minimum intervals for the spacing of executions once they resumed.

The agreement applied to death-sentenced prisoners whose requests to have their appeals reheard were denied by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals while the judicial emergency was in place. The agreement was to remain in effect through Aug. 1, 2022, or one year from the date on which the conditions were met — whichever was later.

Pye’s appeal was decided by the 11th Circuit in April 2021, before the judicial emergency ended, and that’s the relevant date, his lawyers argued. But the three-judge panel of the appeals court didn’t reject his case, instead tossing out his death sentence. The case was reheard by the full appeals court and, ultimately, the 11th Circuit denied his appeal in March 2023, nearly two years after the judicial emergency ended.

Pye’s lawyers wrote that it took more than 24 hours to arrange a phone call with him after the execution order was issued. They added: “This is not normal or consistent with access to and availability to counsel that was previously possible, and it is unacceptable.”

The state argued that the agreement was “expressly limited to a small subgroup of death-eligible inmates.” Pye is not in that group and is thus not exempt from execution while the litigation over the agreement is pending, the state says.

The judge agreed with the state, writing that the timeline of Pye’s case is undisputed and leaves him outside of the group covered by the agreement. Pye’s lawyers are seeking to take that decision to the state Court of Appeals.

Pye’s lawyers also filed a new lawsuit last week accusing the state of violating the contract. And on Monday, they filed a federal lawsuit arguing that the state has unconstitutionally created two classes of death row prisoners — those covered by the agreement’s protections and those who are not.

The Associated Press contributed to this article.

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