The Georgia House unanimously passed a bill on Tuesday lessening the threshold for a person facing the death penalty to be considered intellectually disabled, which would make them ineligible for a death sentence.
State Rep. Bill Werkheiser, a Republican, had previously introduced legislation aimed at making it easier for someone to prove they are intellectually disabled in order to avoid the death penalty in the Peach State, which has one of the nation’s toughest thresholds to overcome.
That bill was proposed just months before Willie James Pye, whose IQ was allegedly low enough to show he was intellectually disabled, was executed after his conviction in the 1993 rape and shooting death of his former girlfriend, Alicia Lynn Yarbrough. Pye’s lawyers argued he was intellectually disabled and brain-damaged.
Pye’s execution bothered Werkheiser, whose legislation at the time never had a vote in committee, but this bill has received more legislative support after passing the House unanimously. Now it heads to the Senate.
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Georgia became the first state to outlaw the death penalty for intellectually disabled people in 1988. The U.S. Supreme Court later followed suit and ruled in 2002 that executing intellectually disabled people violates constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment.
However, the court allowed states to determine the threshold for a person to be considered intellectually disabled. Georgia requires people to prove intellectual disability beyond a reasonable doubt, making it the only state with such a high burden of proof.
The bill advanced on Tuesday also allows defendants to present evidence of intellectual disability at a pretrial hearing that would be mandatory if prosecutors agree. If convicted at trial, defendants could then present evidence of intellectual disability in a separate process before the same jury.
Defendants who are found to have an intellectual disability would receive a life sentence if convicted.
“I believe it is incumbent upon the state to protect those who cannot protect themselves,” Werkheiser said.
In another case, Warren Lee Hill was executed in Georgia in 2015 for killing a fellow detainee despite his lawyers arguing that he had an intellectual disability. In 2002, a judge said that if Georgia used a lower standard than reasonable doubt, Hill would likely have been found intellectually disabled.
When the Georgia Supreme Court in 2021 upheld the death penalty for Rodney Young, the justices found he had failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he was intellectually disabled, although then-Presiding Justice David Nahmias wrote that he would “embrace” legislative efforts to lower the threshold.
Young was sentenced to death in the 2008 killing of Gary Jones, his ex-fiancée’s adult son.
Prosecutors have testified in committee hearings that they do not oppose amending the reasonable doubt standard, but they are against changes to the trial process and the addition of a pretrial hearing.
“The proposed bill cherry-picks from several different states,” said T. Wright Barksdale III, district attorney for the Ocmulgee Judicial Circuit in central Georgia.
Proponents of the bill argue that if jurors have already heard the details of a gruesome crime, they may have a difficult time evaluating evidence of the defendant’s intellectual disability without bias.
Most states allow defendants the opportunity to prove their intellectual disability before the trial and have separate processes for determining a defendant’s guilt and for determining their intellectual disability.
“Changing only the standard of proof is insufficient for ensuring that Georgia does not continue to execute people with valid claims of intellectual disability,” said Mazie Lynn Guertin, executive director of the Georgia Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
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Barksdale claims that the proposal would make the process too complicated and would prevent the death penalty from being carried out at all.
“As this law is constructed, and based on my experience of trying capital cases, it would, for all intents and purposes, cripple us to a point that we would never have a real fair shot at ever obtaining a death penalty for anyone,” Barksdale said, adding that lawmakers should abolish the death penalty if that is what they want, but lawmakers have said that is not their intention.
During two committee hearings on this bill, Republican and Democrat lawmakers seemed unconvinced that the procedural changes would make the process too complicated. Death penalty cases, they noted, already take a long time, including many motions and hearings ahead of the trial.
“We have the death penalty in this state. I’m not going to debate it,” Democrat Rep. Esther Panitch, who is also a criminal defense attorney, said Tuesday. “But if we’re going to mete out the ultimate punishment, it should only be for the worst of the worst, and those we have spent the time to make sure understand their culpability.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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