The Lynching, a lithograph by José Clemente Orozco (1934). Orozco’s searing image was displayed at two seminal exhibitions held in New York in 1935: An Art Commentary on Lynching, presented by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and The Struggle for Negro Rights, sponsored by the John Reed Club and the Artists’ Union.
“The police in this country make no distinction between a Black Panther or a black lawyer or my brother or me. The cops aren’t going to ask me my name before they pull the trigger.”
—James Baldwin
On Wednesday night, the State of Georgia, abetted by the US Supreme Court, executed Willie Pye. It was the first execution in Georgia in four years, long one of the leading death machines in the nation.
Georgia’s pause in executions wasn’t voluntary. It was a consequence of the COVID pandemic, which had caused the prison system to restrict visits to inmates, even visits by lawyers, which meant that the counsels for death row prisoners couldn’t adequately prepare appeals or applications for clemency. All of those limitations remain in place today, even on death row.
But this rule didn’t apply to Willie Pye. The reasons are too legally obtuse and arbitrary to go into. When Georgia, the state without mercy, decided to restart the death machinery, Pye was at the top of the list, a list he shouldn’t have been on in the first place.
Willie Pye was black. No surprise there. Since the death penalty was re-constitutionalized in 1976, 34% of the defendants executed have been black. The rate is even higher in Georgia, which has put to death 77 people since 1976, 29 of them black (38%).
Willie Pye was a black man sentenced to death by an overwhelmingly white jury (there was only one black member) in a Georgia county so notorious for its racism that a confederate monument stood in front of its courthouse until the late 1960s. It now resides in the local cemetery.
Willie Pye was poor. Too poor to afford a lawyer, so a public defender was appointed for him. A bad one and the only one in town. Pye’s lawyer, Johnny Mostiler, put on what could charitably be called a perfunctory defense, neglecting to present a range of mitigating factors that might have spared Pye’s life, such as the abuse and violence he endured as a child and the fact that he may have suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome. Both of Pye’s parents were alcoholics. And his father, who labored on a prison chain gang when Pye was born, was a violent alcoholic, who frequently flailed on the Pye children and their mother.
Yet, the only witness Pye’s lawyer called during the entire trial was…Willie Pye, rarely a winning courtroom strategy. Indeed his lawyer was so ineffectual at trial that in 2021 a three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals took the rare step of vacating Pye’s death sentence on the grounds of inadequate legal representation. But a year later the ruling was reversed by the full court, citing the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, one of the merciless federal crime bills of the Clinton Era crafted by Joe Biden. The appeals court didn’t dispute the ineptness of Pye’s lawyer, but simply ruled that under the Clinton/Biden law he no longer, in the interest of “effectiveness,” had the right to challenge it.
Willie Pye wasn’t the only person convicted for the crime he, alone, was sentenced to death for. Two other men were also arrested for the murder of 21-year-old Alicia Lynn Yarbrough. Both of those men, Anthony Freeman and Chester Andrews, pled out and were sentenced to life in prison. Pye, who maintained his innocence, risked going to trial with a lawyer who didn’t even probe the holes in the story told by his alleged co-conspirators. He paid the ultimate price for making the state prove its case against him. (Freeman, after serving 24 years behind bars, is now free.)
Willie Pye’s lawyer was not only incompetent, he was also, according to other lawyers and courthouse watchers, a racist, and frequently made racial slurs about his own clients, telling one colleague he thought “young black men were lazy” and saying of another client facing execution: “This little nigger deserves the death penalty.”
One of Mostiller’s most egregious failings was not to have Pye given a mental health evaluation before his trial or examine his school records. When Pye’s appellate attorneys did so, they discovered that Pye had an IQ score of only 68, which should have excepted him from execution under the Supreme Court’s decision in Atkins v. Virginia, which ruled that putting to death people with mental disabilities or brain trauma violated their Constitutional rights under the Eight Amendment. But the current Supreme Court rarely feels obliged to follow their own precedents anymore, especially in death penalty cases, and refused to hear Pye’s appeal on these compelling grounds. The Thomas-Alito Court is so obsessed with history and tradition that it seems only a matter of time before it finds a constitutional basis for lynching.
So nearly 30 years after being convicted and sentenced to death in a trial so deeply flawed that three of the jurors who voted for the death verdict pleaded for his life to be spared, the State of Georgia stuck a needle into 59-year-old Willie Pye’s arm and injected him with a dose of phenobarbitol that spread through his system until his heart stopped beating at 11:03 pm.
Willie Pye is dead and Georgia is back in the execution business.
