
          Paying the Price In Pickens County
          By 
            Dowe, KellyKelly Dowe
          Vol. 4, No. 3, 1982, pp. 13-14
          
          When 69-year-old Julia Wilder of rural Pickens County, Alabama, was
allowed to transfer from the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women to a work
release program in Tuskegee last January, she praised God in
thanksgiving.
          "I thank God for opening the minds of the people here to help us. I
knew he would work in his own way," said the elderly black_woman. She
and her longtime fellow civil_rights worker, 51-year-old Maggie
Bozeman, were imprisoned Jan. 11 for a 1979 conviction on three counts
of voting fraud. All-white Pickens juries had found them guilty of
marking ballots for elderly and illiterate blacks in the 1978
Democratic primary and runoff. Circuit Judge Clatus Junkin sentenced
Mrs. Wilder to the maximum five years in prison, and Mrs. Bozeman to
four. It was the stiffest vote fraud sentence in the memory of state
officials.
          After the women failed in their three-year process of appeals to state
courts and the U.S. Supreme_Court, they made an eleventh-hour plea to
Junkin for probation. When he refused and immediately dispatched them
to Tutwiler, the state's penitentiary for women, a public outcry by
civil_rights workers and black political leaders reached a
crescendo. State officials, including Gov. Fob James, hurriedly met
and came up with the Tuskegee arrangement. On Jan. 22, 11 days after
entering prison, the women moved from their common cell to a mobile
home and jobs in Tuskegee. There they remain, living quiet lives under
the guardianship of Macon County Sheriff Lucius Amerson, no doubt
comforted, but still incarcerated.
          If the women were thankful for this bit of clemency by the state,
they surely appreciated its irony as well. Convicted and jailed as
they were under a system which has no standardized mechanism for
prosecuting voting violators, and which almost never imprisons those
transgressors it convicts, the Pickens County women grabbed the brass
ring. They got to serve time for everyone.
          Consider:
          * In 1979, a federal grand jury indicted sixteen people in Randolph
County in east Alabama on charges of voting violations in a 1978
sheriff's election. The charges included conspiracy, vote buying,
casting false ballots, soliciting illegal absentee ballots, and voting
more than one time by an individual. Of the sixteen, seven pleaded
guilty and received fines ranging from $250 to $500 and suspended
sentences. Two more were found guilty in federal trials and received
thousand dollar fines and suspended sentences. A tenth person,
Randolph County Sheriff Charlie Will Thompson, was convicted on seven
counts of conspiracy and vote buying. His sentence: a thousand dollar
fine and three months in jail.
          * Secretary of State Don Siegelman received more than eighteen
complaints about municipal elections in 1980. These included charges
of persons who had moved to other states remaining on the voting rolls
in Florala; a candidate in Headland having absentee ballots
distributed and cast illegally; vote buying in Woodville; and misused
absentee ballots in the towns of Fyffe, Moulton, Double Springs,
Bridgeport, Hamilton and Haleyville, among other
allegations. Siegelman said that as far as he knows, none of these
situations has resulted in convictions.
          * An investigator with the Alabama district attorney's office took
statements from more than twenty Sylacauga area residents after the
1978 Coosa County election. The statements alleged coercion by elected
officials, illegal registration of non-residents and vote
buying. Neither the Alabama district attorney nor the attorney
general, however, both of whom were given copies of the
statements. pursued the matter into court.
          * Circuit Judge Clatus Junkin of Pickens County gave the police
chief of nearby Haleyville a sixmonth suspended sentence in a vote
fraud case recently. Junkin says the circumstances of the case were
different from those of the Bozeman-Wilder case. Anyway, he said, the
police chief had admitted his guilt, which Mrs. Bozeman and
Mrs. Wilder never did.
          In the absence of a statewide elections commission or fair campaign
practices commission in Alabama, the handling of vote law violators
obviously is as inequitable as it is varied.
          Said Siegelman: "Alabama law is so diversified and decentralized,
it puts the prosecutorial decisions in the hands of local, elected
officials. The (state) attorney general has been reluctant to get
involved for political reasons.
          "When it gets down to the district attorney level, many of them are
hesitant to pursue vote fraud cases. They are elected_officials and
they are prosecuting people for election offenses. From a district
attorney's standpoint, they just don't like election cases."
          Siegelman pointed to further limitations imposed by Alabama law.
          "You have to take prima facie evidence to a judge, showing there
were enough illegal votes cast to make a difference in the outcome of
the election. The judge will order the examination of the ballots, if
it's a county with paper ballots, or the voting machines, if it's a
county with machines.
          "But to do that, you would either have to have direct knowledge (of
voting fraud) or a list of voters. Unfortunately, that list is locked
up and sealed inside the voting machine or ballot box. It's a Catch 22
situation which deters any cases filed on the basis of vote fraud."
          As for the sentences of the hapless Pickens County women, "I think
they are out of line for the type of crime they are alleged to have
committed," Siegelman said.
          "Obviously any act that results in votes being stolen or thwarting
of the Democratic process must be punished. But in this case the
sentences seemed to be out of line with other acts committed by other
people in other parts of the state."
          The convictions of Wilder and Bozeman stemmed from the assistance
with absentee ballots they gave to thirty-nine elderly and illiterate
voters in the 1978 Sep-

tember Democratic primary and runoff
elections. Using testimony of local voting officials and thirteen
absentee voters, the prosecutors tried to show at the trials that the
women had used the ballots of the old people to vote many times for
candidates of their own choosing.
          The Pickens County circuit clerk testified that many individuals
requesting absentee ballots asked her to send their ballots not to
their homes but to the address of either Mrs. Bozeman or
Mrs. Wilder. All ballots mailed to those addresses were cast for
precisely the same candidates, an investigator for the county district
attorney said. He said that applicants whose requests for absentee
ballots were signed with an "X" often signed the ballot with a legible
signature, or vice versa. A Tuscaloosa notary public testified that he
notarized, at his office, many applications for absentee voting that
Wilder and Bozeman brought him during the two elections.
          Prosecutors called to the witness stand thirteen elderly voters for
whom absentee votes had been cast. The testimony of many was garbled
and confusing, and several changed their stories back and forth
depending on whether the questions were being asked by the prosecution
or the defense. However, four consistently said they had not voted by
absentee ballot, and the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals pointed to
their testimony when it refused to overturn Mrs. Wilder's
convictions. The most damaging testimony was that of Sophia Spann, 79,
whose application and ballot were signed with an "X", and who said she
always voted at the polls and not by absentee ballot. Moreover, she
testified that she could read and write and did not spell her name as
it was written on both documents. She testified that she did not know
Mrs. Wilder, whose signature was on her application to vote
absentee. Mrs. Spann said Maggie Bozeman had visited her on election
day to find out if she had voted.
          Robert Goines, 87, testified he had applied for an absentee ballot
and made an "X" on the application, which Mrs. Wilder witnessed. But
he said that although he had seen the ballot, he never filled it in or
signed it, because he could not write. He said he didn't give anyone
permission to vote for him. Mrs. Lucille Harris testified that
Mrs. Wilder brought her a paper to sign so she wouldn't have to go to
the polls. But she said she never received a ballot in the mail, and
that Mrs. Wilder didn't visit her again. Lula DeLoach testified she
signed an application for absentee ballot, which Mrs. Wilder brought
to her house, but she d id not mark any ballot. She said Mrs. Wilder
had told her she could "sign the paper" and "fix the paper for me,"
which Ms. DeLoach said she did not object to.
          Mrs. Wilder and Mrs. Bozeman pleaded innocent to the charges
against them. Mrs. Wilder testified at her trial she often helped
people to vote by absentee ballot in the 1978 elections. She said she
often picked up applications for absentee ballots at the circuit
clerk's office, which she distributed herself or through her
workers. But she said she never had the absentee ballots of other
voters sent to her own box unless the voter requested her to.
          She said she would often have an exchange like this with a
potential absentee voter: "'What kind of election is this?' I would
say, 'Well, it's the Democratic.' And they would say, 'That's the way
I want to vote.'"
          "You reckon you will be able to be at the polls?"
          "They would say, 'No. You know I can't get around."
          "And I said, 'Well, would you like for me to show you how you can
vote without getting down there?'
          "' Yeah.'"
          She said she would offer to take the application back to the
clerk's office once the voter filled it out, and that the clerk would
mail the voter a ballot.
          "And most of the time, 'Would you like for the ballot to come to
you?'
          "And they would answer no, that they weren't able to, you know, get
it back to me or nobody else, and they would say, 'No, I can't get it
to you.'
          "Would you like for me to--What would you like for me to do--let it
come to my box, or how would you want it done?
          "'Let it come to your box.'" She said she would agree to that and
to get the ballot back to the absentee voter. She said that when she
or her workers signed names to absentee ballots, it was with the
permission of the individual and that the voter would "touch their
hand to the pen." She said in such visits she took along a sample
ballot fo the Alabama Democratic Conference, the major black political
organization in the state, but filled out the ballot only as
instructed by the absentee voter.
          The unanswered question is: Why did the state, which turns a blind
eye to so many accused voting offenders, allow the Pickens district
attorney to throw the book at these two women? One marvels at the
state's self-contradiction: First it flings them into confinement, but
immediately it fishes them out and sets them up in a work release
program in a town at the other end of the state. And not just to any
town, but to Tuskegee, the home of Tuskegee Institute, Booker
T. Washington and George Washington Carver, a town with a politically
prominent black mayor and a black sheriff, a town which would give
comfort and even honor to the two women. Did this transfer amount to a
pardon? Or was it a sort of apology to the women for their having to
take the stripes for all voting offenders?
          Today, Mrs. Wilder works at a senior citizens center, and
Mrs. Bozeman teaches at a center for retarded children. Their
attorneys continue to seek post-conviction relief.
          It could be argued that in a fifty-eight percent white, rural
county, where most elected_officials are white, the conviction and
jailing of two black political organizers would not bring that much
negative political pressure on the white district attorney, the judge,
or the jury. Many of those who testified against Mrs. Bozeman and
Mrs. Wilder made it plain they would not have voted at all had it not
been for the women's efforts. Many did not know what an absentee
ballot was. Yet they, and other poor, black residents of Pickens
County, are a likely group from which any opposition to white elected
officials would logically come.
          Attorney Solomon Seay thinks the prospect of this opposition
becoming organized was the motivation for the vigorous prosecution and
stiff sentences given the two women. Forty-two percent of the voters
can't determine an election, he says, but if they're organized they
can influence the results. In asking for dismissal of the case, Seay
and the fifteen character witnesses he put on the stand have charged
that the case was racially motivated and was contrived to halt black
voter_registration in Pickens County.
          "I think if black_people do not seize upon this opportunity to
launch a statewide, effective voter_registration campaign to register
every qualified black person in this state to vote, we will have
missed a golden opportunity," Seay said.
          "That's what this is all about--the efforts of two old black_women
to assist functionally illiterate aged and infirmed blacks to cast
their votes."
          
            Kelly Dowe its a freelance writer who lives in
Birmingham, Alabama.
          
        
