A retired Atlanta deputy chief is hoping the way death row inmates are covered in the media will change to reflect more sympathetic victim-friendly reports.
Lou Arcangeli, who spent 29 years with the Atlanta Police Department and worked on the infamous Atlanta child murders case, chooses to continue his fight for justice. These days, however, he picks up a pen instead of a badge.
In a letter to AJC, Arcangeli says he’s fed up with making murderers more “relatable” by covering their chosen last meals. He says more balanced reports are needed to honor the victims of violent crimes over their killers.
“This last meal nonsense seems a literary contrivance to deify [sic] the executed to the level of the biblical “Last Supper”, or to make the murderer more relatable, more human and less evil. It is an obsolete newspaper tradition that needs to end!” he wrote.
As CrimeOnline previously reported, Willie James Pye, 59, was executed at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison this month for the 1993 kidnapping, rape, and murder of Alicia Lynn Yarbrough. Pye and Yarbrough had been in an on-and-off again relationship. At the time of her death, Yarbrough was living with another man.
Pye, Chester Adams, and a 15-year-old then decided to rob the man and bought a gun to facilitate the robbery.
According to court documents, the three went to the residence and found Yarbrough alone with her baby. They forced entry into the house, stole a ring and a necklace, and then forced her to leave with them, leaving the baby home alone.
At a nearby motel, they raped Yarbrough and then took her near a cow pasture where Pye ordered her to lie on the ground face down and shot her.
Yarbrough’s body was found on November 17, 1993, by a Griffin farmer who spotted her lying on the dirt road. Police later said she had been shot three times in the stomach. All three suspects were subsequently arrested.
Pye and Adams initially denied knowing anything about the murder, but the teen confessed and reached a plea deal that made him the key witness in Pye’s trial.
The defense team attempted to paint a picture that diminished Pye’s culpability, claiming he was intellectually challenged, and born with both frontal lobe impairment and fetal alcohol syndrome.
A mental health expert who testified during Pye’s trial, however, said there was no evidence of these medical conditions.
“The State also called its own mental-health expert, who testified that the facts of Pye’s crime, which involved significant premeditation and planning, weren’t consistent with frontal-lobe impairment or fetal-alcohol syndrome—though he acknowledged that Pye had cognitive deficits that would have affected his ability to function in the community,” court documents state.
Arcangeli pointed out that Pye, despite claims of a mental disability, successfully planned and carried out out a robbery and murder.
“The AJC article contained three references alleging that PYE was “intellectually disabled”, but no reference to the pure evil in the detailed planning of the robbery and rape that culminated with his premeditated killing of a 21 year old mother, Alicia Lynn Yarbrough,” Arcanceli wrote.
“Pye competently planned Yarbrough’s execution, bought a handgun days before the murder, recruited accomplices, and when apprehended denied involvement in the crimes. Not the actions of an intellectually challenged individual.”
During opening statements at Pye’s trial, Griffin’s former judicial circuit court attorney, William McBroom, reiterated that evidence showed the murder was premeditated, with Pye thinking that the victim’s youngest child was his.
“Pye thinks it’s his child, and he’s mad about it,” McBroom said.
The victim, a young mother of three, has been largely pushed to the side since her untimely death. But her her oldest daughter, Tawanna Bell, says she’s been given “closure for the first time in [her] life, since the murder,” according to WANF.
A cousin, Gernetta Starks, told the outlet that the family “wanted the world to know that she was somebody.”
“You know the whole time, the whole 30 years, the focus has been on Pye and it hasn’t been on Alicia and it’s not fair. Her children got lost in all of this.” Alicia’s cousin Gernetta Starks said.
Meanwhile, Arcangeli, vows to continue to fight for justice and has made great strides in his efforts.
He once blew the whistle on the city of Atlanta “shaving crime statistics” to make it appear safer. And although he faced smear campaigns for the exposure, it hasn’t stopped Arcangeli from working to make a difference.
His latest quest for justice could potentially be a game-changer for victims and their families across Georgia. Arcangeli says it starts with local media and changing how executions are typically covered.
“Please consider, in the interest of equality, that if last meal nonsense is reported, there must be equal time devoted to the murder victim’s last meal. This information is almost always available from the medical examiner’s autopsy report and is often used to confirm the victim’s time of death. Seems only fair.”
[Feature Photo: Shoes sit under a prisoner’s bed in his cell on death row at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2015, in Jackson, Ga. Georgia has executed inmates by injection since October 2001, when the state Supreme Court ruled electrocution violated the states ban on cruel and unusual punishment. (AP Photo/David Goldman)]
