BOSTON (AP) — Former Democratic Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick is urging U.S. senators to reject President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general, Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions.
In 1985, Patrick was part of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund team representing three black civil rights activists in a failed voting-fraud prosecution handled by Sessions, then U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Alabama.
The three were accused of illegally tampering with large numbers of absentee ballots in Alabama’s rural Perry County. They argued they were helping voters who were poor, uneducated and in some cases illiterate, and marked the ballots with the voters’ permission.
A jury acquitted the three after deliberating for just a few hours.
In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee sent Tuesday, Patrick said Sessions should never have brought the case. He said the theory of Sessions’ case was that it’s a federal crime for someone to help someone else vote or advise them how they should vote, even if they ask for help.
“Pursuing that case was an act of extraordinary quasi-judicial activism,” wrote Patrick. “To use prosecutorial discretion to attempt to criminalize voter assistance is wrong and should be disqualifying for any aspirant to the Nation’s highest law enforcement post.”
Patrick served as governor of Massachusetts from 2007 to 2015 and was a supporter of President Barack Obama. During the Clinton administration, he served as the top civil rights official at the U.S. Justice Department.
Sessions — who was dogged by the case during his failed 1986 confirmation hearing for a federal judgeship — has defended the decision to bring the case.
In a questionnaire he submitted last month to the judiciary committee, he suggested there was evidence for a conviction.
Sessions wrote that he agreed to investigate after the county district attorney told him “extremely large numbers” of absentee ballots were being collected and stored in a central headquarters, where they were being altered to ensure they were marked for particular candidates endorsed by the activists.
Testifying at his 1986 hearing, Sessions said, “It is horrible to change somebody’s vote.”
Patrick sees the case differently.
He wrote that while absentee ballots were used widely at the time, Sessions investigated “only the use by black voters and only where white incumbents were losing political ground.”
He also faulted Sessions for busing elderly witnesses under armed police guard 160 miles to provide grand jury testimony, which he said led many observers to believe voter assistance was illegal. He also said Sessions frequently offered plea deals in criminal cases, but refused in this case.
Patrick wrote that for 30 years he has viewed the case a cautionary tale of what can happen “when prosecutorial discretion is unchecked, when regard for facts is secondary to political objectives.”
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