By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--February 9, 2017
American Politics, News | CFP Comments | Reader Friendly | Subscribe | Email Us
When white voters used the absentee-voting process to keep their vote totals up in this region and overwhelm the burgeoning black vote, Turner and his fellow activists started making house calls to help black individuals fill out absentee ballots and mail them in. Before the 1984 primaries, suspecting Turner and his group of possible illegal activity, the district attorney and a black candidate from the black-and-white coalition requested that the state’s U.S attorney investigate. That attorney was Jeff Sessions.
In the course of this investigation, Sessions stationed an agent outside the Perry County post office, and the agent witnessed the Turners and their fellow activist, Spencer Hogue, mailing hundreds of absentee ballots. An FBI inspection of these ballots revealed that 75 appeared to have been erased or remarked; that number was later reduced to 27. The NYT reports that, at the conclusion of the ensuing investigation, “Albert and Evelyn Turner and Spencer Hogue were indicted in January 1985 on 29 counts, for mail fraud, conspiracy to commit voting fraud and voting more than once.” But in the end, all three were acquitted. Though the complaining candidate in this case was also a black man, it seems evident that there was demonstrable racial animus on the part of those Sessions helped by bringing the case. But bringing the case happened to be Sessions’s job as a U.S. attorney, and there’s no evidence that his decision to do so was motivated by any racism on his part. In fact, as the case was brought back into the spotlight in the context of Sessions’s confirmation hearing, the Turners’ son, Albert Turner Jr. — who currently serves as a Perry County commissioner — released a letter endorsing Sessions for the position of attorney generalThe job of a prosecutor is to enforce the law equally for everyone, without regard to who benefits and who is negatively effected when he does so. It may very well be true that the rivals of Albert Turner and his cohorts in this campaign were pretty nasty people. But if Sessions had evidence that the Turners and Mr. Hogue violated the law, it was his job to bring charges. To not do so because he preferred the ideology or philosophy of those under investigation - which appears to be what Mrs. King thought he should have done - would be to make him derelict in his duties.
View Comments
Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain
Follow all of Dan’s work, including his series of Christian spiritual warfare novels, by liking his page on Facebook.