Two unions representing police and state troopers in Minnesota wrote a letter to Gov. Tim Walz last friday. An elected prosecutor in Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis, was prosecuting one of their own, and they wanted her removed from the case — immediately. 

On Wednesday, four Republican members of U.S. Congress from Minnesota followed up in another letter to Walz expressing “outrage” in the same case. “It is time for us as a nation to stop demonizing law enforcement,” the Republican representatives wrote. They called for an investigation into Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty. At least one of the four, Rep. Michelle Fischbach, has called on Moriarty to resign. 

Only a few days earlier, Minnesota Republican state lawmakers called on Moriarty to resign and drop charges against the state trooper in the case. Lawmakers accused her of coddling criminals and targeting police in “politically-motivated prosecution.” 

The controversy erupted around the prosecution of a state trooper who shot and killed 33-year-old Ricky Cobb II, a Black man, during a traffic stop in July. Moriarty’s office said the trooper’s use of deadly force against Cobb was not justified.

The pressure campaign against the prosecution seems, so far, to be working. Asked about the case during a press conference on Monday, Walz, a Democrat, questioned Moriarty’s handling of the charges and criticized her assessment of the use of force. The governor’s office, however, has not yet said whether Moriarty will be removed from the case. (Moriarty’s office did not respond to a request for comment, but in a previous statement she said the unions wanted Walz to “give special treatment to this case.” Walz’s office did not respond to a request for comment.) 

The attacks like those on Moriarty are not unique to Minnesota. Moriarty was among a clutch of reform-minded prosecutors who started winning elections in greater numbers in recent years. Constituents were increasingly casting their ballots for criminal justice reformers who ran on prosecuting police for misconduct and killing of civilians, ending cash bail, and curtailing the prosecution of nonviolent offenses. 

In response, opponents of the reform push have been more and more explicit about why they want to remove elected attorneys like Moriarty: They’re prosecuting the police.

“It’s clear this is not about safety,” said Jessica Brand, who founded the Wren Collective, a progressive consulting firm, and works with several reform prosecutors. “It’s about power — they don’t want prosecutors in office who will hold them accountable when they abuse their power. That’s the theme that is running through the backlash in every state.”

“It’s clear this is not about safety. It’s about power — they don’t want prosecutors in office who will hold them accountable.”

In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has unilaterally removed two prosecutors who implemented policies he didn’t like, including one who indicted a deputy sheriff for shooting a civilian in 2020. The attorney DeSantis appointed to replace former State’s Attorney Monique Worrell, Federalist Society member Andrew Bain, dropped the charges against the deputy sheriff last week.

In Texas, where top Republican state officials and police have blamed reform prosecutors for police attrition and crime, Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton is now demanding case files on the prosecution of police in any county with more than 250,000 residents. The population threshold targets larger cities where reformers have won office or found substantial support. 

“When certain crimes went up post-Covid, police unions moved quickly to attack progressive prosecutors and their policies, no matter how modest those policies were,” Brand said. “Now, crime is down, and these attacks have not only continued, but have also intensified.”

Removals From SF to Philadelphia

The opposition to district attorneys who ran on prosecuting police misconduct, which often lead to formal recall and removal efforts, has come in large part from the police. 

In their letter to Walz last week, unions for Minnesota police and state troopers blamed Moriarty for a “state of crisis” among law enforcement officers in the state. They cited, in particular, Minneapolis, where the ranks of police have shrunk since an officer killed George Floyd in May 2020. 

The unions wrote, “There is a crisis of confidence in the elected leadership who are supposed to be partners in making our communities safer, but instead seek to score political points through charging every police officer whom circumstances compel to use deadly force, regardless of the evidence.” (In her statement responding to the letter, Moriarty said, “[T]here is a crisis in confidence, but it is not because of attempts at accountability. It is because of well-documented and horrific instances where some officers abused their power and used unauthorized force.”)

Similar sagas have played out from San Francisco to Philadelphia. Police and their unions led attacks against reform prosecutors and poured money into efforts to remove them from office. In Worrell’s case in Florida, DeSantis reportedly worked with law enforcement targeted by Worrell for prosecution to tarnish her reputation before he removed her from office. 

In Moriarty’s case, the attacks have also come from one-time allies. 

Cobb’s killing is not the first case in which Moriarty was threatened with removal for adhering to the reforms she ran on in 2020. Last year, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison took over another case from Moriarty in which she had declined to charge two teens accused of murder as adults. 

Ellison had built his reputation as a reformer and fought off attacks from Republicans claiming he was soft on crime to win election as attorney general in 2022. The juvenile case put Ellison and Moriarty on opposite ends of a fight for reform they had once shared.

The post Prosecute a Cop? You’ll Face Removal From Office appeared first on The Intercept.

Five days before Georgia planned to kill Willie Pye by lethal injection, Assistant Federal Public Defender Nathan Potek stood before a U.S. district judge and made a final pitch to save his client. Everyone, even a man condemned to die, was entitled to equal protection under the law, Potek said. Yet his client was a member of a “disfavored class” thanks to discriminatory actions by the state. And it was about to cost him his life.

Pye was sentenced to die in 1996 for murdering his former girlfriend, Alicia Lynn Yarbrough. His conviction raised red flags, from Pye’s low IQ score to his trial attorney’s alleged racism toward his own clients. Yet Potek wasn’t arguing that Pye faced racial discrimination or that his sentence violated the Eighth Amendment ban on executing people with intellectual disabilities. As far as the law was concerned, those claims were null and void.

Instead, Potek proposed a novel argument. Of the 41 people on Georgia’s death row, Pye was one of several who had exhausted their appeals. Yet Pye alone faced imminent execution while the others were shielded by a legal agreement with the state that had placed executions on hold. “There is no meaningful difference” between Pye and these other men, Potek said.

In many ways, Pye’s predicament came down to bad timing. Georgia’s moratorium dated back to March 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic led the Georgia Supreme Court to declare a judicial emergency, halting executions. As months passed, death penalty lawyers became concerned over the growing number of clients whose cases were reaching their final appeals — and who would be hamstrung by restrictions on prison visitation that prevented their attorneys from preparing for clemency applications and late-stage litigation once executions restarted.

The eventual result was a written agreement in April 2021 between the Federal Defender Program in Atlanta and the Georgia Attorney General’s Office, which promised not to seek any new execution dates until the judicial emergency had been lifted, normal visitation had resumed, and the Covid vaccine had been made available to “all members of the public.”

Still, there was a catch: The agreement only applied to people whose appeals were exhausted during the judicial emergency, which was officially lifted in June 2021.

Today, the same visitation restrictions remain in place. The Georgia Department of Corrections does not allow as many visits as it did before the pandemic, which has “impaired counsel’s ability to … prepare for clemency proceedings and adequately represent their clients,” as the Georgia Supreme Court found. Yet Pye is not protected by the Covid-era contract. Because his appeals were exhausted in 2023, his execution will almost certainly move forward.

It was not long ago that Pye stood a good chance of getting off death row. As the federal defenders were negotiating the April 2021 agreement, a panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was considering a legal challenge alleging that Pye’s trial attorney had provided ineffective representation. It was a long shot; although Pye’s attorney had failed him in profound ways, the barriers standing in the way of relief are hard to overcome. But that same month, the panel vacated Pye’s death sentence, sending the case back for resentencing. It was rare for a federal court to intervene when it came to such a Sixth Amendment claim, the panel acknowledged. “This is one of those rare cases.”

Pye’s victory was short-lived. At the urging of the attorney general’s office, the full circuit court reversed the panel’s order the following year on procedural grounds. Whatever the failures of Pye’s trial lawyer, it ruled, under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, Pye was not entitled to relief after all.

If the reinstatement of Pye’s death sentence was devastating, there was an additional irony that proved especially cruel. Had the 11th Circuit simply rejected his appeal, Pye would have been protected by the agreement between the federal defenders and the state. Instead, the temporary relief led his case to fall through the cracks, placing him in line for execution. His trial lawyer’s failures had doomed him a second time.

With few good options, Pye’s lawyers challenged the looming execution using a civil rights claim ordinarily associated with class-action lawsuits. Under the 14th Amendment, Pye was entitled to equal protection under the law. By excluding Pye from the agreement, the state had created “a distinct, disfavored class of death row prisoners, one without the baseline guarantee of adequate representation,” Potek wrote in a federal court filing. This further violated Pye’s Fifth Amendment right to due process and deprived him of the fundamental right to life.

An oral argument on the matter was set for March 15 at the federal courthouse in Newnan, Georgia. Presiding over the hearing was Timothy Batten, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. A former trial attorney nominated by George W. Bush, Batten had presided over Pye’s federal appeals since 2013. He did not hide his skepticism of Potek’s argument.

“He’s already lost his right to life, right?” Batten asked. Potek conceded that while it was a lawful execution order, Pye was entitled to constitutional rights as long as he was still alive — and his disparate treatment ahead of his clemency hearing violated those rights. “I’m sure you would have cited it if there was any case in the country that was like this,” Batten said.

“Every card was stacked against him.”

Potek tried to impress upon the judge how hastily and opportunistically the state had moved to execute his client. As recently as late February, Pye’s lawyers were negotiating a potential settlement with the attorney general’s office to apply the Covid-era agreement to his case. But on February 27, lawyers for the attorney general abruptly ended the negotiations. Two days later, “with no notice,” the state obtained an execution order. Pye’s date was set for March 20 at 7 p.m. “They didn’t have to provide any notice, did they?” Batten said. “Not statutorily,” Potek said, but it was nonetheless “alarming” behavior. “That wasn’t alarming to me,” Batten replied bluntly. “So go on.”

The hearing lasted less than an hour. Pye’s argument was nothing more than a delay tactic, a lawyer for the attorney general’s office told the judge. “All of it is about more time to get ready for an execution he has known about for over 25 years.”

Outside the courtroom, anti-death penalty activist Cathy Harmon-Christian expressed dismay. The executive director of Georgians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, she was working to get word out about Pye’s case while organizing vigils for the night of the execution.

“There’s just so many problems with the case,” she said, none of which had been discussed at the hearing. And for all the ways in which the case was cast as unique, it was actually emblematic of problems that have plagued Georgia’s death penalty for generations. Pye’s trial attorney was not only ineffective. “He was a known racist,” Harmon-Christian said. “He spent very little time defending Willie.”

“Every card was stacked against him.”

The Morgan Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse in Newnan, Ga., on the eve of the March 15 hearing in the case of Willie Pye.
Photo: Liliana Segura/The Intercept

The federal courthouse where the hearing took place is some 40 miles southwest of Atlanta, just off the historic town square in Newnan. The city has long boasted its claim as “the city of homes,” a nod to the antebellum architecture of its treasured old houses, a number of which survived the Civil War. A marble statue of a Confederate soldier still stands at the center of the original courthouse lawn. The memorial was vandalized in 2021, damaging the soldier’s musket. “It’s just there to piss off Black folks,” a county commissioner who proposed removing the statue told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “People are still fighting that war in their minds and in their hearts.”

The town of Griffin in neighboring Spalding County, where Pye was tried and convicted, moved its own Confederate monument to a cemetery in the 1960s, but local leaders have been loath to break with the past. In 2018, a video went viral of a former city commissioner repeatedly using the N-word while endorsing the designation of April as Confederate History and Heritage Month. The official, who was directing his comments at a Black commissioner, followed up by clarifying, “I don’t use that word anymore.”

Racism and the American death penalty have always been inextricable, particularly in the South, where historians have traced a line connecting slavery, lynchings, and executions. Georgia, whose earliest death penalty statutes applied to crimes committed by slaves or free people of color, has done more to shape the “modern” death penalty than perhaps any other state. It was a Georgia case that led to McCleskey v. Kemp, a Supreme Court ruling that insulated the death penalty from race-based legal challenges by forcing defendants to prove that racial bias had been intentional.

McCleskey was decided less than a decade before a jury dominated by white men sent Pye to death row. He was one of several Black men sentenced to death in Spalding County after being represented by Johnny Mostiler, a lawyer alleged to be openly racist toward his clients. In 2008, Georgia executed a man named Curtis Osborne despite allegations that Mostiler had repeatedly referred to him as a “little n–” who deserved to die. A lawyer who was briefly appointed to represent Osborne alongside Mostiler recalled a conversation in which Mostiler “said he thought young black men were lazy and asked me why I thought that was so.” In 2016, Kenneth Fults was executed despite accounts that Mostiler had slept through much of his trial — and despite statements from a juror who later said he was committed to voting for death “because that’s what that n– deserved.”

Mostiler, who died in 2000, was questioned by a trial judge about his use of racial slurs after one of his clients raised concerns. According to the transcript, Mostiler said that he did not “use those terms out in public.”

Colleagues and contemporaries of Mostiler’s have denied that he was racist against his clients. In a phone call, William McBroom, the former district attorney who tried both Pye and Fults, adamantly rejected the idea that racism infected the cases. “Johnny Mostiler did more for minorities in Spalding County than any other lawyer that I know of,” he said. Mostiler was always willing to give free legal advice, McBroom added. “I don’t see how he made a living until he got the public defender job.”

Whether Mostiler was motivated by prejudice or not, the record in Pye’s case reveals staggering failures. Pye was convicted after a three-day trial in which Mostiler called no witnesses apart from Pye himself. While he called several of Pye’s family members to testify at the sentencing stage, Mostiler failed to investigate and present crucial mitigating evidence that could have led the jury to spare his client’s life.

There is also reason to question the theory the state presented at trial. Pye’s previous appellate attorneys uncovered evidence showing that the star witness in the case — a teenager named Anthony Freeman, who agreed to testify against Pye as part of a plea deal — gave shifting accounts of the crime in the years leading up to Pye’s trial. Years after Pye was sentenced to die, Freeman told Pye’s attorneys that his testimony was coerced by the district attorney and law enforcement, who “made it clear that Willie Pye was the person they were after.”

In the early morning hours of November 16, 1993, a local farmer in Griffin went out to check on his livestock when he spotted a body lying on the dirt road. A sheriff’s deputy identified the body as Alicia Lynn Yarbrough, who was just short of her 21st birthday. She had been shot three times, the fatal shot tearing through her abdomen.

The mother of three young children, Yarbrough had struggled with addiction and abusive relationships. Police quickly zeroed in on her ex-boyfriend, 28-year-old Willie Pye, who was known to sell drugs around town. After hearing that police were looking for him, he went to the station to be interviewed the same day, telling investigators that he had not seen Yarbrough for about two weeks.

But this was a lie. As Pye would later admit, he’d seen Yarbrough the night before, at a local motel where he sometimes stayed under an alias. Pye had been hanging out that night with a man named Chester Adams and a teenager named Anthony Freeman. According to Pye, the pair dropped him off at the motel and later returned accompanied by Yarbrough. Although Pye and Yarbrough were no longer together, they still hooked up from time to time. Yarbrough had sex with all three of them that night in exchange for crack cocaine, Pye said. After that, she left with Adams and Freeman. Pye swore he never saw her again.

Adams was questioned on the same day as Pye. He denied his involvement but later pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to life. But Freeman, who was being held in jail on a separate charge, implicated both men and himself. Although he was 15, he was only in 8th grade and small for his age. “When I saw him, I thought he was about 12 years old,” one sheriff’s investigator later testified. Freeman said that Pye had gone to the house Yarbrough shared with another man, robbed it, and then forced Yarbrough to the motel, where all three of them raped her. Afterward, he said, Pye drove her to a field and shot her. On the basis of Freeman’s account, Pye was indicted for malice murder. Prosecutors announced they would seek the death penalty.

Representing Pye was 49-year-old Mostiler, Spalding County’s lone public defender. The chain-smoking, handlebar mustache-wearing son of a Georgia lawmaker, Mostiler “never conformed to the stereotype of the public defender,” as The American Prospect recounted in a lengthy profile published after his death. “Decked out in flashy jewelry and a black cowboy hat, he arrived at the Spalding Courthouse in a mustard green 1972 Cadillac El Dorado convertible.”

“We’ll enter pleas all week, at a rate of about 10 to 12 every 45 minutes.”

Mostiler had made a lucrative deal with the county to take over the entire indigent defense docket for a flat fee. The goal, he said, was to save money for the county. But for many of Mostiler’s clients, the result was life-ruining. His caseload was preposterous even without the addition of private clients. Spalding County had higher crime rates than many neighboring jurisdictions, and Mostiler was handling up to 900 cases a year. He solved this problem through a steady stream of guilty pleas.

“We’ll enter pleas all week, at a rate of about 10 to 12 every 45 minutes,” Mostiler told the Prospect. Many of the pleas came at the last minute, he added, since “defendants don’t get the fear of God in them ’til a trial is coming up.”

Pye refused to make a deal with the state. “I’m guilty of … not turning in what I know that night about Adams and Freeman bringing Alicia Yarbrough to my motel room,” he insisted on the stand. “But I never considered making no kind of deal because I did not commit no murder.”

Prosecuting the case was McBroom, Griffin’s judicial circuit district attorney, who had a reputation for aggressively seeking death sentences. In his first five years in office, McBroom sent five people to death row, including three of Mostiler’s clients. In his opening statement, McBroom laid out the evidence, along with Pye’s motive: He harbored a grudge against Yarbrough and her live-in boyfriend, Charles Puckett, because Yarbrough had recently given birth to a baby and Puckett signed the birth certificate. “Pye thinks it’s his child, and he’s mad about it,” McBroom said. Pye decided to rob the two, then raped and killed Yarbrough in a brutal act of vengeance.

The evidence against Pye was considerable. There was DNA from sperm matching Pye, along with witnesses who saw him with a distinctive .22 caliber gun that allegedly matched the bullets used to kill Yarbrough. But the case turned on the testimony of Freeman, the only one who claimed to have witnessed the murder. In convoluted testimony, he said that he, Pye, and Chester abducted Yarbrough from her home, gang raped her at the motel, drove around, and then returned to rape her again. Later, they drove Yarbrough to a cow pasture. “All of us got out. He told her to lay flat on the ground, face down, and he shot her.”

Pye was swiftly convicted and sentenced to die.

A guard patrols the fence line at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison on March 12, 2002, in Jackson, Ga.
Photo: Erik S. Lesser/Getty Images

Pye arrived on death row as executions were peaking across the country. During his first decade at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison, the state killed 19 of his neighbors. Although executions have declined ever since, in the nearly 30 years Pye has spent on death row, 56 people have been put to death.

In the meantime, the Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision that might have allowed Pye to get off death row. In Atkins v. Virginia, the court ruled that executing people with intellectual disabilities was a violation of the Eighth Amendment. In a series of mental health evaluations, Pye’s post-conviction attorneys found that he had an IQ score of 68. But efforts to challenge his conviction on that basis were denied.

Post-conviction attorneys found that Pye had an IQ score of 68.

The question of Pye’s intellectual abilities was one of many things that Mostiler should have investigated before trial. But there was no record of a mental health evaluation or efforts to obtain Pye’s educational records.

The more Pye’s post-conviction attorneys learned about Mostiler’s work, the more disturbing it became. Despite his client’s insistence that he did not shoot Yarbrough, Mostiler did not appear to have investigated an alternate theory of the crime. The lawyers uncovered additional statements given by Freeman between his initial arrest in 1993 and Pye’s 1996 trial, which were never turned over to the defense. In one, given during a mental health evaluation, Freeman told a psychiatrist that he and Adams had picked up Yarbrough on the night in question, and she had gone with them willingly, later doing cocaine and having sex with them and Pye. The account echoed what Pye said at trial.

The lawyers also spoke to a friend and neighbor of Yarbrough’s, who said that on the night she was killed, Yarbrough came over to use the phone. “Lynn made some calls to a hotel and asked for Willie’s room,” the friend said. She assumed Yarbrough was asking to be picked up so that she could go get drugs.

Pye’s lawyers also collected dozens of affidavits from Pye’s relatives, neighbors, social workers, and others who filled in the harrowing details of his family history, which was marked by generational trauma, extreme poverty, and violence. Pye’s mother, Lolla Mae, was raised by her grandparents, who lived on a white man’s farm where her grandfather worked the land “in exchange for some of the food and a place for the family to stay.” By the time she was 8 years old, she picked peanuts and cotton alongside her siblings.

Pye’s father, who spent years working on a chain gang, was incarcerated when Pye was born. According to affidavits given to Pye’s attorneys, he drank heavily and beat his wife and kids. In one affidavit, a neighbor recalled seeing family fights spill outside. “You would see the boys attacking their father on the porch to get him away from their mother. … As the older boys grew up, they too began to drink heavily and that made the situation in the house more explosive.”

Uncovering evidence of family trauma is a critical component of any modern death penalty trial. Capital defense teams often include a mitigation specialist, who is tasked with investigating a client’s family history, particularly any evidence of abuse or neglect. But in the mid-1990s, most death penalty jurisdictions had not meaningfully incorporated such work into capital defense. In Spalding County, Mostiler handled death penalty cases without so much as a second attorney, let alone a mitigation specialist.

Billing records reviewed by Pye’s post-conviction attorneys showed a shocking lack of attention to the case. With the trial just weeks away, Mostiler had not yet pursued “a single lead provided by Mr. Pye,” the attorneys wrote in a petition challenging Pye’s conviction. “And it was not until five days before the scheduled start of jury selection that [Mostiler] began to identify mitigation witnesses.”

Pye’s case was described as “a shocking relic of the past.”

This work mostly fell to Mostiler’s investigator, a former cop named Dewey Yarbrough (no relation to Alicia). According to one of Pye’s sisters, Yarbrough asked her to think of good character witnesses for him. “It was short notice, but I tried,” she told Pye’s attorneys. In a deposition, Yarbrough estimated that he met with “maybe four” of Pye’s family members and “even tried to make arrangements” for them to attend the trial. But he did not find them particularly helpful. “I can remember thinking, and I want to say this was during, right before the sentencing phase, you know, I don’t care about going back over there and trying to get them here.”

Judge Jill Pryor, part of the original three-judge panel that vacated Pye’s death sentence, rejected Yarbrough’s characterization in a lengthy dissent to the 11th Circuit’s reversal. “The record unmistakably demonstrates that any failure to marshal family support … was due not to the family’s unwillingness to cooperate but rather to Mr. Yarbrough’s lack of care,” she wrote.

Yarbrough did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

McBroom vociferously denied withholding evidence from Pye’s defense, including the shifting statements from Freeman. “That’s a bunch of baloney,” he said. Besides, he added, the issue had been litigated and the courts upheld Pye’s conviction anyway. He rejected the notion that Freeman’s testimony had been coerced and defended his selection of a nearly all-white jury, pointing out that the victim was Black. “Race is not an issue in this case.”

As for Pye’s upbringing and concerns over insufficient mitigation, McBroom was unmoved. “The family was just a crime family,” he said. He knew plenty of people who grew up impoverished and abused and did not go on to commit murder. Finally, he dismissed the notion that Pye’s IQ should have precluded him from getting the death penalty. “The only intellectual disability he has is a condition called MAH — Mean as Hell.”

Barring any last-minute intervention, Pye, now 59, will die at 7 p.m. tonight.

Judge Timothy Batten denied Pye’s appeal a few hours after the hearing in Newnan. “While one might characterize Pye’s plight as unfair in relation to the few death row inmates covered by the agreement, it does not shock the conscience,” he wrote. Potek appealed to the 11th Circuit, which declined to grant a stay of execution.

On Tuesday, the Georgia Board of Pardon and Paroles held a clemency hearing for Pye. The board members have the sole authority to grant clemency — the governor cannot act alone. In a press release, the board rejected Pye’s appeal for mercy.

Clemency proceedings are closed to the public, but the Department of Corrections released the clemency application prepared by Pye’s attorneys. It called Pye’s case “a shocking relic of the past” and included letters from three jurors who sent him to death row but now oppose his execution. “Many of the jurors felt his attorney Johnny Mostiler did an inadequate job of defending him at trial,” one woman wrote. “It was a serious case but Mostiler could not have cared less.”

Another woman, who was the only Black member of the jury, said she wished jurors had heard about Pye’s background and cognitive impairments. “Mental health is so critical to why people behave the way they do,” she wrote. “How someone is raised matters.”

Through Cathy Harmon-Christian, the anti-death penalty activist, Pye’s relatives declined to be interviewed. According to the clemency petition, “Mr. Pye and his family were relieved and overjoyed” when the 11th Circuit briefly vacated his death sentence. Those who remain in touch with Pye described his positive impact on their lives and those of his neighbors on death row.

“I’ve spent 30 years or so in the prison visitation room with Uncle Will,” one niece wrote. “I’ve seen the way other inmates greet him with a smile, constantly introduce their visitors to him, and share with me how Uncle Will keeps them laughing and has been a source of hope and inspiration.”

“A child gets to a certain age where they need to know the story about what happened.”

Family members on the other side of the case feel differently about Pye. In a phone call, Alicia Yarbrough’s oldest daughter, Tawanna Bell, described how her mother’s murder impacted her and her siblings: “She got took away before she got a chance to even be a mom. Before she even got a chance to make memories with me.” Bell was just 5 years old and living with her grandmother when Yarbrough was killed. But it was her mom who did her hair and got her ready for her first day of school that fall. “She had me looking like a doll,” she said.

The murder devastated Yarbrough’s mother. Gernetta Starks, Bell’s cousin, said the crime “ate away” at her for the rest of her life. “When the police came to inform her that her daughter was murdered — the way she was murdered — the whole family had to console her,” she said. Now Pye’s looming execution was opening old wounds. For Bell, seeing the case back in the news has revealed horrific details of her mother’s murder that she’d never heard before. “I feel like they didn’t explain a lot of stuff to the kids because they wanted to protect them,” Starks said. “But a child gets to a certain age where they need to know the story about what happened.”

Although they support Pye’s execution, both women said his death sentence has done little to ease the trauma the family has lived with for 30 years. A few years ago, Starks launched an advocacy organization inspired by Yarbrough called When She Survives, which seeks to help victims of domestic violence and provide the kind of support they never received. Bell plans to witness the execution alongside her siblings. But she does not expect it to heal her pain.

“We are a forgiving family. But how do you forgive somebody that simply didn’t have any regard for your family member?”

Update: March 21, 2024
Willie Pye was executed by lethal injection on March 20 and pronounced dead at 11:03 p.m. He was 59 years old.

The post After Four Years Without an Execution, Georgia Prepares to Kill Willie Pye appeared first on The Intercept.

English director Jonathan Glazer poses in the press room with the Oscar for Best International Feature Film for “The Zone of Interest” during the 96th Annual Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, Calif., on March 10, 2024.
Photo: Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images

The backlash against even the mildest-mannered protests for Gaza at the Oscars was predictable. Artists, musicians, and actors who wore a pin symbolizing a call for a ceasefire in Israel–Palestine are being called antisemitic.

“The Zone of Interest” director Jonathan Glazer, however, went further in his Oscars acceptance speech: He actually said something. After winning the Academy Award for best international film, Glazer objected that his own Jewishness and the memory of the Holocaust were “being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October — whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza.”

The largest offense here, if the backlash is to be believed, was that Glazer dared speak of context — of the Israeli occupation. He was so bold as to suggest that history did not begin on October 7.

As a letter signed by more than 900 people, described as Hollywood “creatives and professionals,” and published Monday made clear: The very word “occupation” was off limits.

“The use of words like ‘occupation’ to describe an indigenous Jewish people defending a homeland that dates back thousands of years and has been recognized as a state by the United Nations, distorts history,” the letter said, never mind that the military occupation of the Palestinian Territories of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, as well as the Syrian Golan Heights, has been recognized as such by the United Nations since 1967.

But the letter went on to say that “occupation” did more than just distort history, it invoked history’s worst antisemitic tropes: “It gives credence to the modern blood libel that fuels growing anti-Jewish hatred around the world, in the United States, and in Hollywood.”

The indisputable fact of Israeli occupation on Palestinian land is now apparently a “blood libel”: a millennia-old antisemitic canard, which rose to prominence in the Middle Ages, that Jews murder Christians to use their blood for cultish rituals.

To be against virtually any policy that Israel can claim to justify as self-defense would be antisemitic.

By the letter’s logic, it would therefore be “blood libel” to oppose virtually any Israeli policy, from permanent control of all Palestinians “from the river to the sea” — which is what Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he wants — to what human rights groups have recognized as an apartheid system. To be against virtually any policy that Israel can claim to justify as self-defense would be antisemitic.

If that were not enough, the letter is extraordinary in the sheer extent of its denialism. “Israel is not targeting civilians. It is targeting Hamas,” the authors wrote. Unmentioned, however, is that Israeli forces have killed over 31,000 people, including 13,000 children, decimated every form of civilian infrastructure, brought Gaza to the brink of mass starvation, and displaced over 1.7 million people — to say nothing of the credible reports of journalists and academics being individually targeted.

Of course, these people are Palestinians: a word that the Hollywood letter doesn’t explicitly bar, but that nonetheless goes unmentioned.

Read our complete coverage

Israel’s War on Gaza

The most well-known among the “creatives” are horror film director Eli Roth and actors Debra Messing and Michael Rapaport, who have been outspoken in their support of Israel’s war on Gaza.

More notable are the list of executives and producers who have added their names — unknown to most of us industry outsiders. They included Spyglass Media Group head and former MGM CEO Gary Barber, former Paramount Pictures CEO Sherry Lansing, producer and major television executive Gail Berman, as well as former president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Producers Guild of America Hawk Koch.

Many on the list are screenwriters and showrunners. The agents, producers, and executives denouncing Glazer, however, are engaging in no less than a bullying campaign, leveraging their Jewishness specifically against his, in their numbers, to make baseless and extreme claims.

The Jewish writer Sarah Schulman, commenting on the letter signatories, said that the backlash betrays a “strange childishness — an inability to imagine that they could be part of anything wrong. A total inability to be self-critical.” 

It is the Zionist equivalent of what the late Jamaican-British philosopher Charles Mills called “white ignorance” — by which he did not mean things people with white skin do not know. Rather, it is “​​a cognitive tendency” that functions as an epistemic block, resistant to facts that challenge white supremacy and expose its violence. It leaves the person “aprioristically intent on denying what is before them” — no matter how unassailable the thing is. Mills stressed that “what makes such denial possible, of course, is the management of memory.”

Glazer’s film — about how the family of SS officer and Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss built a domestic idyll at the gates of the concentration camp — depicted this sort of entrenched, ideological, and willful ignorance. The knee-jerk backlash to Glazer’s speech exposes it once again.

The post Even Mentioning “Occupation” at the Oscars Is Antisemitic, Some Jewish Hollywood Figures Say appeared first on The Intercept.

Two lawsuits will move forward against the federal government over the FBI’s warrantless search of hundreds of safe deposit boxes, a court ruled this week. Last year, in a related case, a federal appellate judge called the FBI’s raid “egregious” and “outrageous.”

“This case is yet another chapter in the long legal saga of the FBI’s criminal investigation of U.S. Private Vaults,” wrote federal Judge Robert Klausner of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California in his rulings on Thursday, which denied the government’s motions to dismiss.

In March 2021, the FBI raided U.S. Private Vaults, a Beverly Hills safe deposit box company, and federal agents seized and searched all of its customers’ deposit boxes. According to court filings, the boxes contained millions of dollars in cash, plus a mix of jewelry, personal effects, and documents such as wills and prenuptial agreements.

The FBI had a warrant for the raid itself and to seize the customers’ boxes, but that warrant explicitly did not authorize any “criminal search or seizure” of the boxes’ actual contents. The warrant application also omitted key details of the raid plan, including that the special agent in charge had directed other agents to open each box, preserve fingerprint evidence, inventory the contents, and have drug dogs sniff all the cash. Some of the former U.S. Private Vaults customers say their property was never returned, giving rise to some of the claims in the lawsuits.

“We are happy to be able to move forward into discovery and to be able to basically have the government answer for what happened for the property that went missing,” said Joseph Gay, an attorney at the Institute for Justice, the libertarian nonprofit representing several former U.S. Private Vaults customers.

In January, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously likened the FBI’s actions to British colonial-era “writs of assistance” — the sort of overreach that gave rise to the American Revolution and, subsequently, the Bill of Rights. “It was those very abuses of power, after all, that led to adoption of the Fourth Amendment in the first place,” the 9th Circuit ruled.

In one suit, Jeni Pearsons and Michael Storc, a married couple, claim the FBI seized $2,000 in cash and $20,000 worth of silver during the raid, but the cash was never returned. In another suit, Donald Mellein, a retiree, alleges the FBI seized 110 gold coins but never returned 63 of them that, combined, were worth more than $100,000.

In near-identical rulings this week, Klausner, the judge, determined both lawsuits may proceed against the federal government, although he dismissed all claims against the FBI special agent who led the U.S. Private Vaults raid and drafted the incomplete warrant affidavit. Klausner also dismissed some of the plaintiffs’ claims against the government, but not all of them. (The federal prosecutor’s office in the cases declined comment.)

Gay, the plaintiffs’ attorney, said that these rulings in the related federal cases — in the 9th Circuit and the district court — complement each other.

“The first case shows the government never should have opened the safe deposit boxes to begin with,” Gay said. “This case shows that, once they did, they had an obligation to keep the property safe.”

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