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Biden Commuted Their Death Sentences. Now What?

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As three men challenge their commutations, others brace for imminent prison transfers and the finality of a life sentence with no chance of release. In the days after President Joe Biden commuted his death sentence, 40-year-old Rejon Taylor felt like he’d been reborn. After facing execution for virtually his entire adult life for a crime he committed at 18, he was fueled by a new sense of purpose. He was “a man on a mission,” he told me in an email on Christmas Day. “I will not squander this opportunity of mercy, of life.”

Georgia | Keith Tharpe, who appealed death sentence over juror’s racist views, dies at 61

Keith Tharpe
Keith “Bo” Tharpe spent years on Georgia’s death row insisting a juror’s racist views had put him there.

Tharpe — who finished what he expected to be his last meal on Sept. 26, 2017, before the U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay of his execution — died late Friday at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Butts County. 

His death likely was due to complications from cancer, according to a news release from the Georgia Resource Center, which represented him in recent years as he attempted to appeal his death sentence. He was 61.

In 1991, Tharpe was sentenced to death for killing his sister-in-law, Jaquelin Freeman. Seven years later, juror Barney Gattie dropped several racially biased statements while being interviewed by Tharpe’s lawyers, including calling Tharpe the n-word.

“After studying the Bible, I have wondered if black people even have souls, ” said Gattie, according to an affidavit he signed years after the trial.

Gattie also said Tharpe’s sister-in-law came from a family of “nice black folks.”

“If they had been the type Tharpe is, then picking between life and death for Tharpe wouldn’t have mattered so much,” Gattie said. “My feeling is, what would be the difference?” 

Gattie, who was white, said he voted to sentence Tharpe to death because he “wasn’t in the ‘good’ black folks category.” 

However, Gattie later backed off that statement. Gattie is now deceased.



In a 6-3 decision in 2017, U.S. Supreme Court justices said they were concerned Gattie was racist and only voted for the death penalty because Tharpe was black, sending the case back to a lower court on appeal.

Still, a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously against Tharpe’s appeal, saying it could not retroactively apply a 2017 U.S. Supreme Court opinion allowing courts to consider evidence of racial animus by jurors.

The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Tharpe’s subsequent appeal.

RELATED Anti-gay prejudice may have driven jurors to sentence a man to death

The Georgia Department of Corrections has not yet responded to a media request to officially confirm the inmate's death.Marcia Widder, one of Tharpe’s lawyers at the Georgia Resource Center, said the courts’ refusal to consider the impact of Gattie’s views “a stain on the judicial system” and calls for more effort to eliminate racism in the criminal court system.

Source: ajc.com, Marlon A. Walker, January 26, 2020


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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde

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