Eagle Scout, Loving Husband, Outsider, Racist Vote Suppressor
By 
Emily Bazelon has an excellent account of Jeff Sessions’s attempt to give civil rights workers lengthy jail sentences for helping African-Americans vote:
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.” Asked by a grand juror whether she’d voted absentee for the first time in the September primary, a Perry County resident named Fannie Mae Williams answered: “Uh-huh. First and last.” Two other women told the grand jury they were done with voting, according to the book “Lift Every Voice,” by Lani Guinier, a professor at Harvard Law School.
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. “It was hell,” remembers Evelyn Turner, now 80. (Her husband died in 2000.) “We had always helped people with voting, for ages, and they trusted us. Why would you mess with someone’s ballot, if you knew it wasn’t what they wanted? We weren’t fools.”
[…]
When the Turners and Hogue went to trial, in June 1985, their supporters came in such numbers that entry to the courtroom in Selma required a ticket. Witness after witness among the 17 voters who testified said that while they’d received assistance from the Turners and Hogue to fill out their ballots, they’d done so willingly. The exceptions were members of a single family of six, who said their ballots were altered without their permission.
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. A cheering crowd poured onto the steps of the courthouse.
During the last month, Sessions has sought to portray other aspects of his tenure as United States attorney as friendly to civil rights, though the lawyers who did the work in the cases he cited have accused him of exaggerating his role. The Perry County case is a precursor to current Republican claims that voter fraud at the polls is a widespread problem, which Sessions has promoted, even though there is little evidence to support it. Voter-impersonation fraud is a “myth,” a letter signed by more than 1,200 law professors opposing Sessions’s nomination states. Former Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, who helped defend Spencer Hogue, calls Sessions’s efforts in Perry County a “cautionary tale.” The case, Patrick wrote, “demonstrates what can happen when prosecutorial discretion is unchecked, when regard for facts is secondary to political objectives.”
Can the Democrats stop this utterly disgraceful nominee from becoming Attorney General? Probably not. Should a single Democrat even consider voting for him? No.