john01992
Former ESPNer still in recovery mode
Posts: 16,277
Joined: Jul 2013
I Root For: John0 out!!!!
Location: The Worst P5 Program
|
RE: Abolition gag rule
(02-09-2017 03:23 PM)Hood-rich Wrote: (02-09-2017 03:15 PM)john01992 Wrote: (02-09-2017 03:12 PM)Hood-rich Wrote: (02-09-2017 03:10 PM)john01992 Wrote: (02-09-2017 03:08 PM)Hood-rich Wrote: OK, so what makes Jeff Sessions a racist?
he did try to jail people for registering black voters.
He was acting in his official capacity in a voter fraud case. Try again.
are you for fu**ing real?
Serious as a heart attack.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact...6271cf9b70
Quote:In 1982, then-District Attorney Roy L. Johnson wrote to Sessions about complaints of voting irregularities and said the most serious allegations involved interference with absentee ballots. (Johnson is now deceased.) Absentee ballots were a tool to turn out rural black voters without fear of intimidation at the polls, but legitimate questions were raised about fraud.
In 1983, a majority-black state grand jury weighed these voter fraud allegations and found serious problems — primarily with the tampering of the right of black Perry County citizens to vote — and asked the federal government to intervene.
But Sessions did not investigate.
“My feeling was that the problem would not continue; that the people would straighten up, clean up, after their act. And I saw no reason to prosecute after the county had not prosecuted, and we did not,” Sessions said, adding that irregularities that year involved only a few ballots.
Then, in 1984, black officeholders complained of voter fraud and filed an election contest, Sessions said. Perry County, one of the smallest Alabama counties with a population of 15,000, had more absentee ballots filed than Jefferson County, population 700,000, according to a local news article.
Investigators interviewed witnesses who said their ballots were changed and observed a post office where Turner and other activists dropped off ballots. They tracked the ballots and found about 75 out of 700 had been changed, Sessions said — a larger scale than was alleged in 1982.
Quote:The prosecution brought a weak case and was understaffed and underprepared compared with the defense. Prosecutors unsuccessfully argued that even legal ballot changes — in the form of voter assistance for the elderly and the illiterate — constituted voter fraud.
Sessions was not personally involved in the case until the end, when it became clear that the prosecutors would fail.
I raise you:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/09/magaz....html?_r=0
But by the early 1980s, a local group, Concerned Citizens of Perry County, and a branch of the White Citizens Council, historically a white supremacist network, were working against Turner’s group to elect what they called a “coalition” of white and black candidates. A handbill from nearby Greene County urged voters to “support good, responsible blacks” to defeat “the radical forces of the black front.”
Concerned about white absentee voting from afar, black leaders sent Turner to Washington, to complain to lawyers at the Justice Department, whose job was to enforce the Voting Rights Act. “They said, ‘We can’t do anything,’” Sanders remembers. “‘It’s a gray area in the law. Y’all need to learn to use the absentee-ballot process yourselves.’”
Turner did so, attending workshops in the Alabama attorney general’s office in hopes of increasing turnout among local rural black voters. “Once I learned myself, then it was my job to go out through the area and teach the rest of the counties how the law worked,” he later testified before Congress. The activists started visiting people at home, helping them fill out their ballots and mailing them. In 1982, his work paid off. The number of black absentee voters rose, and in Perry, Greene and three other counties in the Black Belt, black candidates, including those supported by Turner’s group, won majorities on the school board and county commissions.
After the election, the local district attorney convened a grand jury to investigate absentee balloting, focusing only on black voters aided by Turner’s group. The grand jury did not indict anyone.
In September 1984, before primary elections, the district attorney and a black candidate from the black-and-white coalition asked for a federal investigation by the United States attorney for Southern Alabama — Jeff Sessions.
Federal prosecutors have enormous discretion over which cases to bring. It’s not clear why a fight among county politicians would have interested them, absent the larger shift in the Black Belt’s racial dynamics. The night before the primary, Sessions stationed an F.B.I. agent outside the Perry County post office. The agent saw Albert and Evelyn Turner and a third activist, Spencer Hogue, mailing hundreds of absentee ballots. The F.B.I. opened the ballots and found 75 with candidate votes they suspected had been erased or re-marked.
The government later lowered the number of disputed ballots to 27, but they still sparked a giant investigation. Ten F.B.I. agents fanned out, interviewing more than 1,000 residents about whether they could read or write, whether anyone helped them vote and whether they had altered their own ballots. The Black Belt includes 10 or so counties; the F.B.I. concentrated on the five in which black voters were making strides toward political ascendance. And in each of the five counties, the government targeted longtime black activists and political leaders — figures like Turner.
In October, as part of the investigation and before the general election, Sessions’s office convened a federal grand jury more than 160 miles south, in Mobile, where the jury pool included more white people. Surrounded by F.B.I. agents and police with guns, about 20 black voters from Perry County, many older and some frail, were taken by bus to Mobile, where they were fingerprinted, photographed and questioned by the grand jury about their votes. “This was the most degrading thing,” the Rev. O.C. Dobynes, who accompanied the voters on the bus, told Congress a year later. “To me, it was just simply saying, We are going to scare you into saying what we want you to say.”
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. Sessions and his assistants claimed the defendants filled out the disputed absentee ballots themselves. Each faced decades in prison.
Liebman also described evidence of absentee-voting irregularities, including altered ballots, on behalf of candidates, both black and white, who were primarily supported by white voters. But Sessions told the Senate that “no evidence was presented to us at that time of fraud by whites, at least anything credible.”
Justice Department policy in the 1980s supported bringing election cases “only when federal involvement is either necessary to vindicate paramount federal interests, or as a prosecutor of last resort to redress longstanding patterns of egregious electoral abuse.”
During the trial, the prosecution adopted an exceptionally broad theory, arguing that it was a crime for a voter to sign a ballot that someone else filled out for him. “Even if the voter authorizes someone to complete the ballot?” the judge asked. “That is correct,” one of Sessions’s assistants said. The judge ruled that this theory was contrary to election law and the Constitution, and at the close of trial, threw out many of the counts against the Turners and Hogue. They were acquitted of the rest by the jury, which had been picked in Mobile and had seven black members and five white ones.
|
|
