Trump's pick for attorney general is shadowed by race and history [View all]
Evelyn Turner is 80 now and a stroke survivor, but she can still recall sitting in a packed courthouse in Selma, Ala., facing a jury that could send her and her husband, an aide to Martin Luther King Jr., to prison for 150 years.
The charges: mail fraud, voting more than once, and changing absentee ballots.
The trial was nerve-racking, recalled Turner, a mother of four. I didnt know if I was going to go to jail and leave my family.
The U.S. attorney bringing the election fraud case was Jeff Sessions, today a four-term Republican senator from Alabama who is President-elect Donald Trumps nominee for attorney general. Back in 1985 when his prosecutors tried the Turners and a third activist, black Americans were gaining ground in elective offices across the South. Sessionss office charged the Marion Three named after the Perry County town where the voter fraud allegedly took place with tampering with absentee ballots cast by mostly elderly black voters to favor the activists preferred candidates.
Sessionss team lost the case. After deliberating for three hours, a jury of seven blacks and five whites found the defendants not guilty on all charges. The case and allegations of racial insensitivity figured prominently at a Senate hearing a year later at which Sessionss nomination to be a federal judge was defeated by a vote of the Judiciary Committee. Some 30 years later, he will appear before the same committee of which he is now a senior member as the nominee to become the next attorney general.
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