• Halloween Monday Oct 31

    halloween-trick-or-treat

    The Haleyville City Hall has been bombarded by calls asking if the city will celebrate Halloween on a different day other than Monday, October 31. The answer is an official  NO. Even though Monday is a school night, it will still be Halloween. The Haleyville Police Department requests you drive carefully and look out for those Halloween Trick or Treaters Monday night.

  • Tommy Arthur Appeals Again

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    Tommy Arthur, age 74, who has ties to the Haleyville area, has been an Alabama Death Row inmate at Holman Prison in South Alabama since his conviction for a contract killing of a Muscle Shoals man, Troy Wicker. Prosecutors said Wicker’s wife Judy had hired Arthur to kill her husband. She was convicted for her role and served 10 years of a life sentence in prison. Arthur was on work release for having killed a woman in a Bear Creek business years before. Both she and Wicker were shot through the right eye.

    Arthur is asking the governor to stay his planned execution on November 3. Arthur says he is innocent. His New York attorneys are also seeking a stay of execution in a federal appeals court.

    To date, Governor Bentley has not stayed any execution during his two terms. Arthur has managed to stay alive by seeking stays of execution six times since 2001, some within hours of the scheduled executions. The last one in 2015 was made following Arthur’s lawsuit over Alabama’s lethal injection method. Arthur has actually had three trials, and this time he has requested testing evidence in possession of the state, specifically a hair from a black man he says was never tested. Originally, Judy Wicker testified a black man had killed her husband and raped her. A black inmate, who had served time at Holman with Arthur had confessed to the killing of Wicker and which brought about one of the six stays, but that confession was thrown out.

    The Alabama Attorney General’s Office believes the last judge got it right and is asking the appeals court to again, throw out Arthur’s appeal and let the seventh planned execution on November 3 proceed.

    More on this story and the letter to Bentley can be seen on Al.com.