The Supreme Court granted a temporary stay of Georgia inmate Keith Tharpe’s death sentence Tuesday night after his legal team argued that one of his jurors harbored a racial bias and voted for the death penalty because he is black.
Tharpe had been scheduled for execution at 7 p.m. by lethal injection for the murder of his sister-in-law Jacqueline Freeman in 1991, but the Supreme Court put that on hold while it considers whether to take up Tharpe’s case.
Tharpe’s lawyers requested that the Georgia Supreme Court and Supreme Court stay the execution because a white juror used racial slurs when referring to black people in post-conviction testimony. The juror, the now-deceased Barney Gattie, said “because a black person doesn’t have a soul, giving one the death penalty was no big deal.”
The Georgia Supreme Court had declined to stop the execution earlier in the day Tuesday.
“One of the many ways that the death penalty system is irrevocably broken is the discriminatory way it is applied,” said Kristina Roth, senior program officer with Amnesty International USA. “Keith Tharpe’s case is a chilling example of how callous the state can be in matters of life and death. While the Supreme Court granted a temporary reprieve to Keith Tharpe, this cannot be allowed to happen again. Capital punishment is cruel and inhuman and should be left in the dustbin of history once and for all.”
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch dissented, producing a 6-3 decision.
