An American convicted in 1996 to the death penalty for kidnapping, raping and then killing his ex-partner is awaiting execution on Wednesday in Georgia, in the southeast of the United States.
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Willie James Pye, 59, is to be executed this evening by lethal injection in a prison in Jackson, southeast of Atlanta, capital of a state which has not carried out executions for more than four years .
If it takes place, it will be the third execution since the start of the year in the United States, in addition to the one canceled at the last minute on February 28 in Idaho, due to failure to administer the lethal solution to the condemned in the legal deadline.
Willie James Pye was convicted of the 1993 murder of Alicia Yarbrough, a woman with whom he had had an on-again, off-again relationship and whom he had kidnapped and then raped with two accomplices, including a 15-year-old boy.
His death sentence was overturned by an appeals court in 2021 on the grounds that his court-appointed lawyer had poorly defended him by failing to cite either his signs of mental disability or the poverty and abuse he suffered as a child. But this sentence was reinstated in 2022.
In their request to commute his sentence, rejected Tuesday by the state clemency board, current attorneys for Willie James Pye, an African-American, call his trial “a shocking relic of the past in which a court-appointed attorney racist and overworked, Johnny Mostiler, has effectively abandoned his post.
Under contract with Spalding County to represent all needy defendants, in addition to his private practice, Johnny Mostiler, who has since died, handled hundreds of cases a year, systematically botching his clients’ defense, lawyers say of the condemned.
In its annual report in December, the specialized observatory Death Penalty Information Center estimated that most of the prisoners executed in 2023 in the United States “would probably not be sentenced to death today”, due in particular to the consideration of their mental health problems and trauma, or legislative changes.
