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An execution scheduled for next week would be Georgia’s first in more than four years. The state is moving beyond a deal reached amid the coronavirus pandemic that halted deadly injections.
Willie James Pye, 59, is scheduled to be executed on March 20. He was convicted of murder and other crimes for the murder of his ex-girlfriend, Alicia Lynn Yarbrough, in November 1993.
Georgia last carried out an execution in January 2020. In April 2021, the Attorney General’s Office reached an agreement with lawyers for death row inmates to stay executions for a certain group of prisoners and identify situations where they could resume.
Here’s why it’s been more than four years since Georgia carried out an execution.
After the U. S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, Georgia resumed executions in 1983. The four-year pause on executions sparked the coronavirus pandemic, and the similar arrangement the longest pause since. From 2010 to 2020, the state executed 30 people, totaling nine in 2016 and five in 2015.
Unlike other states, Georgia has had no trouble getting the drug it uses for deadly injections. Prison officials said they were obtaining the sedative pentobarbital from a pharmacy whose identity is through state law.
Executions stopped in Georgia in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, but court proceedings continued, meaning death row inmates were still executed when they exhausted their remedies.
In early 2021, a committee of a judicial COVID task force tasked lawyers for death row inmates and the state’s attorney general with determining situations in which executions could resume. After negotiations, they concluded the agreement in April 2021.
Executions would resume six months after 3 situations have been met, according to the agreement: the expiration of the judicial state of emergency against COVID-19, the resumption of general visits to state prisons, and the availability of a COVID vaccine “for all. “members of the state. . . the public. ” It also set minimum periods for spacing out executions once they have resumed.
The agreement applied to death row inmates whose appeals had been denied through the 11th U. S. Court of Appeals while a judicial emergency was in effect. The agreement would remain in force until August 1, 2022, i. e. one year from the date the situations would be fulfilled, whichever is later.
State officials received an execution warrant in April 2022 against Virgil Delano Presnell Jr. , setting his execution for May 17, 2022. But Presnell’s attorneys for the Federal Defender Program filed a lawsuit, alleging the state violated the agreement. The judicial state of emergency had expired in June 2021, but they said the other situations had still been met.
A Fulton County Superior Court halted the execution less than 24 hours before it was due to take place. The state Supreme Court did not immediately rule on the state’s appeal, so the stay order remained in effect until the execution period expired.
The Georgia Supreme Court ruled in December 2022 that the agreement was a binding contract. In a concurring opinion, Justice Charlie Bethel wrote that “everyone can count on the state to keep its word. “
The case went back to the lower court, and both sides tried to reach a settlement. On Feb. 27, state attorneys informed lawyers for death row inmates that further settlements were not worth negotiating, according to a court filing prepared by Pye’s lawyers.
On Feb. 28, the day before the state received an execution order against Pye, his attorneys filed a motion for him to join litigation over the settlement. They argued that the needs of the agreement in terms of visits and COVID vaccinations were not yet being met. .
“We are beyond shocked and outraged that in the midst of the settlement negotiations, the Attorney General’s Office has acted to continue the execution of Willie Pye, one of our clients included in the negotiations, without informing us or the court,” said Nathan Potek. , which represents death row inmates in the Federal Defender program.
Pye’s appeal was made to the 11th Circuit in April 2021, before the judicial emergency ended, and that’s the applicable date, his lawyers argued. But the three appeals court judges did not dismiss his case, instead overturning his death sentence. The case was heard by the entire Court of Appeals, and eventually the 11th Circuit dismissed his appeal in March 2023, nearly two years after the judicial emergency ended.
Pye’s lawyers wrote that it took them more than 24 hours to set up a phone call with him after the execution warrant was issued. They added: “This is not general or consistent with the access and availability of counsel that was possible in the past. And it’s unacceptable. “
The state argued that the settlement was “expressly limited to a small subset of death-eligible inmates. “Pye is not part of this organization and is not exempt from enforcement while litigation over the settlement is ongoing, the state says.
The ruling agreed with the state, writing that the timeline of Pye’s case is indisputable and leaves him out of the organization covered by the settlement. Pye’s lawyers are trying to take that ruling 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 lawsuit at the federal level, arguing that the state had unconstitutionally created two categories of death row inmates: those covered through the settlement’s protections and those who were not.
Family members of Lori Ann Smith, an 8-year-old woman who kidnapped and killed Presnell as she was returning home from school in May 1976, were disappointed and disappointed in 2022 when Presnell’s execution did not take place due to the dispute over her hiring. .
Now, nearly two years later, with executions about to resume but Presnell still protected, they are “discouraged and frustrated,” sitting “in the limbo of a nightmarish court due to a civil case,” they wrote in a statement. it seems that justice is “farther away than ever” for Lori.