Trump's pick for attorney general is shadowed by race and history
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 didn’t 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 Trump’s 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. Sessions’s 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.
Sessions’s 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 Sessions’s 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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If Sessions is confirmed, rumor has the AL Gov. Bentley is thinking about appointing Roy Moore to fill the vacancy. 
