A Georgia man convicted of killing his former girlfriend is set to be executed on Wednesday evening.
Willie James Pye, 59, is scheduled to be put to death with a lethal injection of the sedative, Pentobarbital.
He was convicted of murder, rape and other crimes in the November 1993 killing of his ex-girlfriend Alicia Lynn Yarbrough.
A Georgia parole board rejected his request for clemency on Tuesday.
His lawyers say he did not have proper representation from the public defender at his 1996 trial.
The monitoring group Death Penalty Information Center noted that his lawyer only spent about 150 hours on the case, including the trial. They said the lawyer had a lump-sum deal with Spalding County to represent the entire indigent criminal caseload, which numbered some 800 felony and five capital cases.
The group says at least three of the public defender's clients have been executed.
"Had defense counsel not abdicated his role, the jurors would have learned that Mr. Pye is intellectually disabled and has an IQ of 68," they said, according to the Associated Press.
His lawyers claim Pye suffered from frontal lobe brain damage, potentially caused by fetal alcohol syndrome, which harmed his planning ability and impulse control.
Defendants who are intellectually disabled are ineligible for execution. Experts said that Pye meets the criteria, but that the burden of proof in Georgia was too high to reach, his lawyers argued.
The Georgia Parole Board rejected those arguments.
Pye had been in an on-and-off romantic relationship with Yarbrough, but at the time she was killed, she was living with another man.
Pye, Chester Adams and a 15-year-old had planned to rob that man and went to the house where Yarbrough lived. She was alone with her baby.
They kidnapped her, leaving the baby alone, prosecutors said.
They drove to a motel, where they raped Yarbrough.
They then forced her back into the car and drove onto a dirt road. Pye ordered Yarbrough out of the car, made her lie face down and shot her three times.
The three were quickly arrested after her body was found.
Pye has planned for his death and ordered a final meal. He requested two chicken sandwiches, two cheeseburgers, french fries, two bags of plain potato chips and two lemon-lime sodas, according to state prison officials.
He would be the first person executed in Georgia since 2020.
