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Willie Pye Execution Scheduled For 3/20/24

Willie Pye is scheduled to be executed by the State of Georgia for the murder of Alicia Lynn Yarbrough

According to court documents Willie Pye and Alicia Lynn Yarbrough were once in a relationship however it would end badly

Alicia Lynn Yarbrough would move into the home of another man and Willie Pye decided to rob them of their weapons. When they found Yarbrough alone with her baby, Pye would take items from the home and would kidnap Alicia and leaving the baby alone in the home

Willie Pye and the other people with him woukld take Alicia Lynn Yarbrough to a hotel where she would be sexually assaulted repeatedly. They would then take her to a remote location where Pye would fatally shoot the woman

Willie Pye would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death

-Update – Willie Pye was executed on March 20 2024

Willie Pye News

A Georgia man should not be executed because he is intellectually disabled and feels remorse for killing his former girlfriend three decades ago, his lawyers wrote in seeking clemency for him.

Willie James Pye, 59, is scheduled to be put to death Wednesday using the sedative pentobarbital in what would be the state’s first execution in more than four years. Pye was convicted of murder and other crimes in the November 1993 killing of Alicia Lynn Yarbrough.

A clemency hearing is set for Tuesday. In Georgia, those hearings are conducted in secret, with the result announced afterward.

Now that his execution is imminent Willie Pye lawyers are claiming that his IQ is too low for him to be executed and he has shown remorse since the murder which took place in 1993

“Had defense counsel not abdicated his role, the jurors would have learned that Mr. Pye is intellectually disabled and has an IQ of 68,” Pye’s public defenders wrote in their clemency application.

“They also would have learned the challenges he faced from birth — profound poverty, neglect, constant violence and chaos in his family home — foreclosed the possibility of healthy development,” they wrote. “This is precisely the kind of evidence that supports a life sentence verdict.”

Pye’s lawyers also cited severe problems in the Spalding County justice system in the 1990s and said that Pye has been a positive influence on those around him while he’s been in prison.

Pye had been in an on-and-off romantic relationship with Yarbrough. At the time she was killed, Yarbrough was living with another man. Pye, Chester Adams and a 15-year-old boy had planned to rob that man and bought a handgun before heading to a party in Griffin, prosecutors have said.

The trio left the party around midnight and went to the house where Yarbrough lived, finding her alone with her baby. They forced their way into the house, stole a ring and necklace from Yarbrough and took her with them when they left, leaving the baby alone, prosecutors have said.

They drove to a motel, where they took turns raping Yarbrough and then left the motel with her in the teenager’s car, prosecutors have said. They turned onto a dirt road and Pye ordered Yarbrough out of the car, made her lie face down and shot her three times, according to court filings.

Yarbrough’s body was found a few hours after she was killed. Pye, Adams and the teenager were quickly arrested. Pye and Adams denied knowing anything about Yarbrough’s death, but the teenager confessed and implicated the other two.

The teenager reached a plea agreement with prosecutors and was the main witness at Pye’s trial. A jury in June 1996 found Pye guilty of murder, kidnapping, armed robbery, rape and burglary, and sentenced him to death.

Pye’s lawyers have argued in court filings that other statements the teen made are inconsistent with what he said at Pye’s trial. Those statements, as well as statements Pye made during trial, indicate that Yarbrough left the home willingly and went to the motel to trade sex for drugs, the lawyers said in court filings.

Pye’s lawyers also wrote in court filings that Pye was raised in extreme poverty in a home without indoor plumbing or access to sufficient food, shoes or clothing. His childhood was characterized by neglect and abuse by family members who abused alcohol, his lawyers wrote.

His lawyers also argued that Pye suffered from brain damage, potentially caused by fetal alcohol syndrome, that harmed his ability to plan and control his impulses. They also argue that he is intellectually disabled and is therefore ineligible for execution, citing the findings of several experts who evaluated him.

Pye’s lawyers have long argued that he should be resentenced because his trial lawyer didn’t adequately prepare for the sentencing phase of his trial. A three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with Pye’s lawyers in April 2021. But the full federal appeals court overturned that ruling in October 2022.

Adams, now 55, pleaded guilty in April 1997 to charges of malice murder, kidnapping with bodily injury, armed robbery, rape and aggravated sodomy. He got five consecutive life prison sentences and remains behind bars.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/georgia-man-sentenced-death-seeks-clemency-grounds-intellectual-disability

Jerome Bowden Georgia Execution

Jerome Bowden was executed by the State of Georgia for a double murder. According to court documents Jerome Bowden would break into a home and stab to death a mother and her daughter. The elderly woman who was paralyzed and bedridden and her daughter would be found days later. Jerome Bowen would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death. Jerome Bowden would be executed by lethal injection on June 25, 1986

Jerome Bowden More News

Strapped into Georgia’s electric chair, moments from meeting his fate, Jerome Bowden uttered his last words.

I would like to thank the people of this institution for taking such care of me as they did,” said Bowden, 34, convicted of a gruesome murder in Columbus. “I hope by my execution being carried out, it will bring some light to this thing that is wrong.”

Then a prison official flipped a switch, sending 2,000 volts of electricity through Bowden’s body. Two minutes later, a physician pronounced him dead.

That was June 24, 1986. Thirty years later, Georgia officials insist that details of Bowden’s execution remain, by law, “confidential state secrets.”

The State Board of Pardons and Paroles recently turned down a request from two documentary filmmakers to release documents concerning Bowden’s long-ago appeal for clemency. The filmmakers are especially interested in a board-ordered IQ test that apparently found Bowden to be, in the language of the day, mentally retarded.

“They don’t care about historical accuracy,” said Paula Caplan, a Harvard University professor who has spent a dozen years working with the director Mark Harris on “American Justice: The Jerome Bowden Story.” Their film, still unfinished, credits Bowden’s execution with swaying public opinion – and the U.S. Supreme Court – against executing people with intellectual disabilities. (Warning: the film contains graphic crime-scene photographs.)

Two years after putting Bowden to death, Georgia became the first state to bar such executions. But the state law spares only condemned killers who are judged “beyond a reasonable doubt,” the highest standard of proof in the U.S. legal system. The Supreme Court prohibited the practice in 2002, but deferred to states’ judgment on whether inmates are disabled.

The film is “a history about a major turning point in U.S. law that started in Georgia,” Caplan said in an interview. “But it’s still happening, and it’s still happening the way it happened to Jerome Bowden.”

In 2015, for instance, Georgia executed Warren Lee Hill, whose IQ was 70, for beating his prison cellmate to death. An IQ of 70 or below is generally considered to indicate a disability.

The records the filmmakers sought on Bowden’s execution are confidential under state law, said Steve Hayes, a Parole Board spokesman. The law, however, also gives the board the discretion to make the documents public.

“In determining whether to declassify the records, the board determines whether declassifying the materials furthers public policy, assists law enforcement or aids in the protection of the public,” Hayes said. “The board determined their request did not meet any of the criteria.”

More than perhaps any other state agency, the parole board operates with virtually no public scrutiny. It considers clemency requests and most other matters in private and, in most cases, offers no explanation for its decision.

This decision leaves a hole in the film, which begins in 1976 in Columbus.

Police were called to check on the well-being of Kathryn Stryker, 55, who lived with her 76-year-old mother, Wessie Bell Jenkins. In the kitchen, an officer found Stryker’s body, disfigured from being beaten and stabbed. Jenkins lay in bed, badly wounded but still alive four days after the assault. She died of a heart attack in a hospital about a month later.

Detectives arrested a 16-year-old neighbor, James Lee Graves. He confessed to robbing the women but said his friend Jerome Bowden, then 24, killed Stryker and assaulted Jenkins.

Jerome Bowden had served time in prison on a burglary conviction, but relatives and friends told the filmmakers he was not violent.

“Jerome wasn’t a bad child,” his sister Josie Lee Henderson said in the film. “He was off some.”

Another sister, Shirley Thomas, said Bowden was “retarded” – a “slow learner” who attended “a special class for special people.” He could not read, Thomas said, and could not have comprehended the signed confession that detectives later presented at his trial.

Both sisters are now dead.

When Jerome Bowden went on trial, a judge denied a request from his court-appointed lawyer – trying his first criminal case – to pay for psychological testing. The judge did not allow the lawyer to mention Bowden’s intellectual disability in front of the jury.

Testifying in his own defense, Bowden denied killing Stryker. He said he confessed only because a detective told him it would keep him “from going to the electric chair.”

In a separate trial, Graves was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Now 56, he was released on parole in 2012.

Jerome Bowden spent nearly a decade on Death Row before officials set an execution date. He appealed for clemency from the parole board, mentioning that at age 14, his IQ was recorded as 59 – 41 points below average intelligence.

The board granted a temporary stay of execution and ordered a new IQ test. Ten days later, a psychologist told the board that Bowden scored 71 on a verbal section of the test and 62 on the non-verbal portion. His combined score was 65 – still in the disabled range.

But the board lifted the stay, describing Bowden as “mildly retarded.”

“We learned a great deal of what ‘mildly retarded’ means,” a parole board member was quoted as saying in news reports. “A mildly retarded person is not walking around in a cloud. … If he doesn’t understand the relationship between pain and punishment now, he did then.”

Jerome Bowden was put to death the following morning.

Caplan, who also is a psychologist, wants to see the test papers from 1986 to assess whether the IQ examination was properly administered and interpreted.

“It may be it was administered by the book,” she said. “But we do not know that. This man was executed because of it.”

https://www.ajc.com/blog/investigations/years-later-details-disabled-man-execution-still-state-secrets/GNtfMdTqyZrTpscahSaNZK/

John Young Georgia Execution

John Young was executed by the State of Georgia for a triple murder. According to court documents John Young would break into the home of the victims and would beat to death three elderly people Coleman Brice, Gladys Brice, and Katie Davis. John Young would also attack three others in the home. John Young would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death. John Young would be executed by way of electric chair on March 20 1985

John Young More News

The sister of triple murderer John C. Young, who died early Wednesday in Georgia’s electric chair, said he faced his execution calmly and his only concern was for the welfare of his brothers and sisters.

Katie Young Vasser, who spent more than three hours with the condemned man Tuesday at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Center, said he read the Bible and expressed hope that his four sisters and three brothers would comfort each other after his death.

Young, 28, spent nine years on death row for murdering three elderly Macon residents during a 1974 rampage. Coleman Brice, 85, his wife Gladys, 83, and Katie Davis, 83, were beaten and kicked to death in their homes.

Three other elderly residents of Young’s racially mixed neighborhood were seriously injured in similar attacks. All six were white.

Young is the sixth man, and the fifth black, to be executed in Georgia since the state resumed using the electric chair in 1983 after a 19-year suspension.

Mrs. Vasser, who lives near Houston, Texas, said her brother never acknowledged the murders.

″I don’t think he knows,″ she said, adding that he was ″real, real out on drugs″ when the attacks occurred.

Mrs. Vasser and another sister, Annie Duncan of Milledgeville, were among Young’s last visitors Tuesday.

″We read the Bible, we cried and when we left he had a smile on his face,″ Mrs. Vasser said in a telephone interview. ″He had peace within … and, having come to know Christ, he was calm.″

No representatives of the victims’ families were at the prison for the execution.

Young’s attorneys filed numerous last-minute appeals based on the admission of his trial lawyer that he was under the influence of drugs while representing Young. But Young’s last chance for a stay vanished Tuesday evening when the U.S. Supreme Court turned down his appeal request by 5-3.

About four hours later, Young was escorted into the execution chamber and strapped into the varnished wooden chair by six guards.

In a barely audible final statement delivered to 12 official witnesses, Young complained that poor people and blacks were ″pawns of society.″

″Being born black in America was against me,″ he said. ″Y’all cry that America was built on Christianity, I say it was built on slavery.″

At 12:15 a.m., Warden Ralph Kemp read the court’s execution order and two guards placed a leather harness over Young’s shaved head, while two others attached electrodes to his right leg and head.

Then, with a leather mask over his face, 1,080 volts of electricity was applied.

Two minutes later the current was turned off and his body was allowed to cool for six minutes before two doctors pronounced him dead.

Outside the central Georgia prison, about 30 death penalty opponents staged a 45-minute vigil, holding candles and singing hymns.

About 20 people demonstrated in favor of the execution, including Ed Stephens, grand dragon of the Georgia Ku Klux Klan, and two other robed Klansmen. The two groups were separated by a barbed wire fence.

https://apnews.com/article/3618d56eb2dfb6d1c53cf6cbc8b47bb8

Van Solomon Georgia Execution

Van Solomon was executed by the State of Georgia for the murder of a store manager during a robbery. According to court documents Van Solomon would shoot and kill the store manager during a robbery. Van Solomon who was a former Minister was arrested, convicted and sentenced to death. Van Solomon would be executed by way of the electric chair on February 20 1985

Van Solomon More News

Van Roosevelt Solomon, a former minister who was once a robbery-shooting victim himself, was executed in Georgia’s electric chair early Wednesday for the 1979 torture-murder of a convenience store manager.

Solomon went to the execution chamber after a final meal of fruit and chocolate ice cream and was put to death with a single, two-minute surge of 2,080 volts of electricity.

The 41-yearold former Oklahoma Baptist minister was pronounced dead at 12:27 a.m. EST. Prison officials said his body was turned over to his family for cremation.

‘I would like to say I would like to give my blessing to all the people who tried to save my life,’ Solomon said after being strapped into the electric chair.

Among those who joined the fight to save Solomon was was the widow of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., who said his execution would be ‘a travesty.’

Solomon walked into the execution chamber calmly and spoke quietly to prison guards who strapped his arms, legs and chest into the wooden chair. After making his final statement, Solomon prayed briefly with the prison chaplain, then stared intently while warden Ralph Kemp read his death sentence

When the electricity surged through Solomon, he bolted upright with clenched fists. Afterwards, his torso relaxed and slumped forward and moments later he was prounounced dead by two prison physicians.

Defense attorney George Kendall, who witnessed the execution, sighed deeply, closed his eyes, lowered his head briefly, then stared intently at his dead client before leaving the execution chamber.

About 50 demonstrators stood in a light rain outside the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Center. Death penalty protesters decried executions as ‘modern day crucifixions’ while capital punishment advocates called it ‘a permanent attitude adjustment.’

Hours before Solomon was put to death, the Supreme Court and Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles refused his pleas for a stay and clemency.

He became the 38th convict executed in the nation and the fifth put to death in Georgia’s electric chair since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976.

Solomon was sentenced to death for killing Roger Dennis Tackett, the manager of a convenience store in Smyrna. Five years earlier, Solomon almost died when he was shot in the stomach during a holdup of a downtown Atlanta grocery store he managed.

Defense attorneys insist Solomon’s accomplice, death row inmate Brandon Jones, pumped five bullets into Tackett, a 35-year-old Phi Betta Kappa graduate of Georgetown University and father of a 7-year-old daughter.

Prosecutor Tom Charron disagreed. He said there were two pistols and both men had gunpowder residue on their hands.

‘They shot his thumb off as he was dying because they wanted to know where the money was,’ said Charron, who called the slaying ‘particularly horrible.’

The victim’s father, Norman Tackett, 72, said the execution would ease his pain ‘to some extent.’

‘They have all the evidence that proves they’re guilty and they should have to suffer too,’ he said.

The condemned killer spent his final day visiting relatives, including his mother, sisters, aunts, nieces and nephews.

Solomon, the son of an alcoholic father and pious mother, served 3 years in Oklahoma prisons for assault and armed robbery before becoming an assistant pastor of a Baptist church in Lawton, Okla.

Friends in Lawton and Atlanta, where Solomon moved in 1973, say he took in numerous homeless and needy people and the pastor of his Lawton church called him ‘a caring and deeply Christian man.’

Defense attorneys say the jury that sentenced Solomon to death was never told about his past good deeds.

Coretta Scott King wrote the pardons board that Solomon’s execution ‘would be a travesty of justice.’

https://www.upi.com/Archives/1985/02/20/Van-Roosevelt-Solomon-a-former-minister-who-was-once/8441477723600/

Roosevelt Green Georgia Execution

Roosevelt Green was executed by the State of Georgia for the robbery, kidnapping, sexual assault and murder of a woman. According to court documents Roosevelt Green would kidnap the victim from her place of work after stealing money from the cash register. Roosevelt Green would take the woman to a remote location where she was sexually assaulted and murdered. Roosevelt Green would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death. Roosevelt Green would be executed by way of the electric chair on January 9, 1985

Roosevelt Green More News

Coed killer Roosevelt Green, insisting he is innocent, lost a last-minute bid for clemency Tuesday and was to die in Georgia’s electric chair shortly after midnight with his mother watching.

The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles refused to grant a reprieve for Green, a black man twice convicted of killing an 18-year-old white coed in 1976.

Green, 28, was to be executed at 12:15 a.m. EST Wednesday and prison officials said his mother, Annie B. Green, would be among the 14 official execution witnesses.

Prisons spokesman Freed Steeple said Green, after a lengthy afternoon visit with his mother, formally asked prison officials to allow her to witness his execution.

Steeple said warden Ralph Kemp then asked Green’s mother if she wanted to witness the execution, ‘and she said yes, which is surprising.’

Steeple said to his knowledge, no mother had ever watched her son executed in Georgia — at least not in recent history.

Green requested no special last meal, Steeple said, and declined to eat the regular prison dinner of turkey pot pie.

Steeple said Green’s visitors left the prison at 4:15 p.m. and the condemned man ‘is just just watching television

The former migrant worker insisted he was not present when Theresa Carol Allen, an honors student from Cochran, Ga., was shot twice with a high-powered rifle — a claim supported by his accomplice.

‘We believe Roosevelt Green was an active participant in a continuing conspiracy and the logical conclusion of that conspiracy was murder,’ said Michael Wing, chairman of the five-member parole board. ‘Whether or not he pulled the trigger, we do not know.’

Green would be the fourth person executed in Georgia and the 34th in the nation since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976. He would be the third to die in the United States within two weeks.

The Supreme Court denied a stay of execution Monday in a rare 4-4 tie vote.

Prison spokesman Fred Steeple said Green spent most of his final hours visiting in his death watch cell with his mother, attorneys and the Rev. Murphy Davis, a prison minister. Steeple said Green made no special requests.

Davis said Green’s mother had hoped the parole board would grant her son a reprieve, saying she believed the evidence was ‘enough to grant clemency.’

Green visited Monday with his boyhood friend from Minter, Ala., William Daniels, Daniels’ wife and their five children.

‘They say he’s the meanest man in prison,’ said Davis, ‘but if you could have seen him sitting with those children on his lap …’

Green, was sentenced to death twice for the murder of Allen, who was abducted from a convenience store, raped, shot twice and her body dumped in a rural area.

Carzell Moore also was convicted of the slaying and sentenced to death. He remains on death row.

Moore, according to appeal testimony, told another inmate that after the abduction, he was left alone with Allen, a freshman nursing student at Middle Georgia College, while Green went to get gas. Moore said he then shot the woman.

The Georgia Supreme Court ruled in a 1980 appeal the conviction should stand because Green left the woman alone on a dark road witha man he knew to be dangerous.

Kenneth Allen, the victim’s 25-year-old brother, said he had forgiven Green for the murder, but still thought the execution should be carried out.

‘I am a born-again Christian, and even if the sentence isn’t carried out, I forgive him,’ said Allen. ‘But capital punishment is part of our judicial system. If they’re not going to carry it out, they should take it off the books.

https://www.upi.com/Archives/1985/01/08/Coed-killer-Roosevelt-Green-insisting-he-is-innocent-lost/9820474008400/