Twenty-seven years to the day after he murdered his sister-in-law, Keith Tharpe will ask the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles to spare his life.
Tharpe, 59, is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 7 p.m. Sept. 26 for the 1990 murder of Jaquelin Freeman. The parole board will hear his clemency plea on Sept. 25.
Tharpe is also asking the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to step in. His lawyers argue one of the jurors who voted for death was motivated by racist views. In court filings, they allege that the now-deceased juror, Barney Gattie, once said, "After studying the Bible, I have wondered if black people even have souls."
Credit: Credit: Georgia Department of Corrections
Credit: Credit: Georgia Department of Corrections
If Tharpe is executed according to schedule, he will be only the second man Georgia has put to death this year, unlike 2016 when the state executed a record nine murderers.
The last person Georgia executed was J.W. Ledford, Jr. who died by lethal injection at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Center in Jackson on May 17. Ledford had killed an elderly physician and neighbor, Harry Buchanan Johnston, in 1991.
In Tharpe’s case, he shot Freeman three times after stopping her and his estranged wife as they drove to work. The murder came just a few weeks after his wife left their violent marriage and moved in with her mother
In a phone call to his estranged wife, Tharpe told her if she wanted to “play dirty,” he would show her “what dirty was.”
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