USA: Stoppen Sie die Hinrichtung!

Willie Pye, a Black man, was arrested in 1993 and charged with the 1992 murder of his former girlfriend. The Spalding County public defender was appointed to represent him. He acted as Willie Pye’s sole lawyer, and during this time he also represented four other capital defendants as well as hundreds of others charged with non-capital offences. As noted by a federal court in 2021, according to his billing records, the lawyer spent about 150 hours preparing for Willie Pye’s trial (and a total of little over 200 hours including court hearings and the trial itself). The American Bar Association has pointed out that at least 10 times this amount of time is typically required for appropriate representation in a capital case that proceeds to trial. After the jury voted to convict Willie Pye, the trial moved into its sentencing phase. This lasted one morning and ended in a death sentence. 

The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), aimed in part at facilitating executions, became law in 1996. Under the AEDPA, according to the US Supreme Court, federal courts must operate a "highly deferential standard for evaluating state-court rulings, which demands that state court decisions be given the benefit of the doubt". Even before the AEDPA, when federal courts addressed claims of inadequate defence representation, "judicial scrutiny of counsel’s performance [had to] be highly deferential". The AEDPA added another layer; now federal review had to be "doubly deferential", said the Supreme Court. In 1998, the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions found that the AEDPA had "further jeopardized the implementation of the right to a fair trial" under international law. The Act has contributed to manifest injustices, including in Georgia. 

In 2021, a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit unanimously found that this was one of the rare cases under the AEDPA in which a claim of ineffective assistance of counsel denied on the merits in state court is found to warrant relief on federal review. The panel concluded that the state court analysis was based on unreasonable factual determinations and an unreasonable application of federal law, thereby freeing the panel to fully review the claim anew. The panel concluded that it was quite evident that the trial lawyer had not provided constitutionally adequate representation, having conducted only the "most cursory" of investigations into mitigation evidence, including failing to obtain a mental health evaluation. As a result of his "paltry" investigation, the jury heard "virtually none of the "powerful mitigating evidence" presented on appeal, including evidence of Willie Pye’s sub-average intellectual functioning, frontal lobe brain damage and severe depression, or of his traumatic childhood in which involved "near-constant physical and emotional abuse, extreme parental neglect, endangerment, and abject poverty" which had "pervaded" his daily life as a child as well as his "troubled adulthood". The US Supreme Court had long before Willie Pye’s trial recognized the validity of childhood abuse as mitigating evidence in capital trials. The 11th Circuit panel found that the evidence presented on appeal "paints a vastly different picture" to what was presented to the jury. Willie Pye had been prejudiced by his lawyer’s failure and was entitled to a new sentencing. 

The state appealed for a rehearing before the full 11th Circuit, which in 2022 reversed the panel’s decision. It did not dispute the panel’s finding that the lawyer had failed to prepare for trial but ruled that, Willie Pye had not shown that his case was one of the rare cases permitting federal relief under the AEDPA. Two judges dissented (and two others joined the ruling "despite reservations" about it). The dissent noted that "the majority opinion does not defend trial counsel’s performance" and accused the majority of rendering the writ of habeas corpus "illusory – impossible – even to obtain" and denying Willie Pye the "second chance he deserv[ed] to convince a jury to spare [his life]".

At the time of his trial, Georgia was the only state in the USA prohibiting the execution of people with intellectual disability, throwing into even starker relief his trial lawyer’s failure to investigate this issue. In 2002, the US Supreme Court finally took the step of categorically prohibiting the use of the death penalty against such individuals. Willie Pye’s current lawyers have presented compelling evidence that he has an intellectual disability. To prove this disability, a defendant must establish (1) significantly subaverage intellectual functioning (an IQ of under 70-75), (2) adaptive deficits associated with this, and (3) manifestation prior to the age of 18. Unlike any other state in the USA, Georgia law requires that intellectual disability be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. It is undisputed that Willie Pye has significantly subaverage intellectual functioning and an IQ of 68, and school records and teacher testimony indicate it manifested before the age of 18. The only point of dispute is around adaptive deficits because the state here presented an expert who agreed Willie Pye has undoubted adaptive deficits but disagreed that those deficits were significant enough to meet the second element of an intellectual disability assessment. Under the uniquely strict "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard, this was enough to keep Willie Pye under sentence of death.