The U.S. Justice Department has set an execution date of Tuesday, Sept. 22, for a man who raped and killed a Gilmer County nurse after she arrived home from shopping with her fiancé.
William LeCroy is to be put to death by lethal injection at a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. His lawyers have filed a petition asking President Donald Trump to commute the sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The petition says LeCroy was willing to accept a life without parole sentence before his capital trial in 2004, but prosecutors rejected it.
Credit: TNS
Credit: TNS
The clemency request notes that LeCroy’s brother, a state trooper, was shot and killed in the line of duty in 2010. In that case, Fulton County prosecutors allowed his killer to plead guilty in exchange for a life without parole sentence.
“The pain and sorrow felt by the LeCroy family at potentially losing two of their sons is unimaginable,” the petition said. “It is all the more painful that the system worked so differently and unfairly in their eyes.”
In March, the Justice Department ended a 17-year-long hiatus of federal executions. LeCroy’s would be the sixth so far this year.
The 30-year-old Joann Lee Tiesler returned to her mountain home on Oct. 7, 2001, when she came upon LeCroy. He raped and killed her, strangling her with an electrical cord, slitting her throat and stabbing her five times. He drove off in her car and was arrested two days later in Minnesota.
Instead of allowing state prosecutors to take the case, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Atlanta stepped in and charged LeCroy under the federal carjacking statute. LeCroy’s lawyers argued this was not a carjacking, but a deranged attack committed after Tiesler found him burglarizing her home.
LeCroy had developed a “delusional fixation” on Tiesler and killed her to break an evil spell he believed she had cast on him, his clemency petition said. “He only took her car later, after he realized he had no other means of transportation."
LeCroy’s appeals on that issue have been rejected.
Nine years after LeCroy killed Tiesler, his brother, Georgia State Trooper First Class Chad LeCroy, tried to pull over Gregory Favors in Atlanta for a broken taillight. Favors had an 11-year criminal record and had recently bonded out of jail on new charges. He sped off and later crashed his car.
When the 38-year-old Chad LeCroy approached, Favors pulled out a gun and fatally shot the trooper. Favors then drove off in LeCroy’s car, an act that made him eligible to be charged under the federal carjacking statute.
Instead, Fulton prosecutors obtained a murder indictment and sought the death penalty. The decision allowing Favors to plead guilty in 2014 and receive a life without parole sentence shows how arbitrary capital punishment is, William LeCroy’s clemency petition said.
“The wildly disparate impact of local federal prosecutors’ use of their discretion to apply the death penalty is a compelling reason for an act of mercy toward the LeCroy family that has already suffered such a great loss,” the petition said.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office declined comment on the petition.
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