Alabama Sheriff David Abston Slapped More Than 100 Blacks With Drug Charges To Boost County Coffers, Arrestees Say. NAACP Asks U.S. Justice Dept To Intervene
The Pickens County Ala. courthouse is a brick Victorian era building in downtown Carrolton—and home to the ghost of Henry Wells. Wells was a former slave freed at the end of the Civil War, and, in the grip of Reconstruction in 1878, authorities accused him of setting the courthouse on fire.
Wells fled with a lynch mob in close pursuit. He ran into county’s new courthouse, up the stairs and into the attic, where he peered at the baying mob below. Legend has it that at that moment, lightening struck the court, etching the doomed man’s face in the window forever. He was eventually captured – and shot to death.
Some folks in Pickens County today will tell you things haven’t changed much.
A sheriff in rural west Alabama arrested 110 people for felony drug distribution, but those arrested say they were nabbed under false pretenses, denied due process and believe the mass arrests were just a ruse to create revenue for the hardscrabble county.
More than 90 percent of the arrests last winter in Sheriff David Abston’s “War On Drugs” came out of two small, poor, predominantly black towns in Pickens County, a rural stretch of western Alabama home to fewer than 20,000 people. Of the 110 arrests, 105 were African-American.
Arrestees told BOSSIP neither Sheriff Abston nor his deputies produced warrants to arrest them or search their homes. They say sheriff’s officers didn’t read them their Miranda rights. Many languished in the Pickens County Jail on high bails – $40,000 or more – in a county where the median income is $28,741.
They were hauled off to an overcrowded county jail where they said road kill was served, the bathroom is a mop bucket and where one woman reported a guard’s sexual abuse.
“It’s ruined my life,” arrestee Antonio Ball, 22, told BOSSIP. “We really do need help down here. They’ve messed up our records. They’ve messed up a lot of people’s lives.”
Now, the local NAACP has stepped in, delivering the accused’s sworn statements to the U.S. Justice Department. The statements, which were seen by BOSSIP, paint a picture of a county where Sheriff Abston ignores black residents’ constitutional rights and views them as little more than cash machines.
“We’ve never experienced anything like this, where so many people have come forward and report they were falsely arrested,” Benard Simelton, president of the Alabama state chapter of the NAACP told BOSSIP. “The NAACP is asking for a review by the U.S. Attorney, as well as by the state attorney general’s office and the FBI. They need to look into this and make sure individual’s rights were not violated in the way that the sheriff has handled this.”
Sheriff Abston told BOSSIP that he didn’t want to talk about the “War on Drugs,” the arrestee’s allegations or conditions in the Pickens County Jail.
“It’ll be in court,” Abston, who employs his wife as an investigator and whose annual salary and benefits total nearly $107,000, told BOSSIP. “I’ll comment in court.”
Paul Daymond, the spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Birmingham office, said the FBI was aware of the situation in Pickens County, but declined to comment further. A spokeswoman for the Alabama State Attorney General said the office’s policy was not to confirm if they are or are not investigating the Pickens County arrests. The Justice Department did not return BOSSIP’s numerous requests for comment.
Sheriff Abston repeatedly ignored BOSSIP’s public records requests on the revenue the “War On Drugs” made for the department and the Pickens County Jail.
But Pickens County’s budget records show that court fees—the biggest revenue generator after taxes— jumped nearly 10 percent this year to $104,195 from 2014.
That money may have helped pay for the nearly $70,000 the county allocated for it’s three-member “Drug Task Force,” which claimed responsibility for the arrests in the sheriffs department’s press releases. That same fund was in arrears to the tune of $162,397 in 2012, according to an independent state audit.
None of the county’s commissioners would respond to BOSSIP’s request for an accounting of the “War On Drugs” finances.
The lion’s share of the “War On Drugs” arrests centered on Aliceville and Pickensville, small, predominantly African-American towns sandwiched between the city of Tuscaloosa and the Mississippi state line.
Aliceville resident Sandi Zacharias told BOSSIP Sheriff Abston showed up at her house looking for an ex-boyfriend, and threatened her with a taser when she asked to see a warrant. She said he claimed to have one but wouldn’t show it to her. She was later arrested for drug distribution, and when she got to jail, she said, the jailers gave her a mop bucket to relieve herself in. She said she had to stand in front of another female inmate as the inmate urinated in the bucket in view of incarcerated men.
“She was afraid that the men would see her,” Zacharias, who wrote her account in an affidavit NAACP officials said they sent to the Justice Department.
“But after about four hours, who would be expected to hold their pee?”
Sandi Zacharias, of Aliceville, AL, was arrested and charged with felony drug distribution as part of Sheriff David Abston’s “War On Drugs.”
Zacharias, a nurse’s aide and mother of two, said she’d never been arrested in her life, but she was arrested and charged with “Unlawful Distribution of a Controlled Substance,” and “Penalty Enforcement,” for allegedly selling synthetic marijuana. Her bail was set at $50,000. Since getting out, she said sheriffs deputies told her she has to report to the department for random drug tests, and she lost her job at an area nursing home after sheriff’s officers notified her employer of the arrest. Zacharias said she’s now relying on food stamps and child support to make ends meet. Her ex-boyfriend’s mother ponied up $1,500 for a bail bonds man to get her out. She’s now making $150 monthly payments to the bail bonds man.
“My whole life is literally flushed down the toilet,” Zacharias told BOSSIP. “It’s like they’re using us for revenue. They’re trying to get money out of us.”
Under Alabama state law, the recommended bail range for “Class B” felonies like “Unlawful Distribution of a Controlled Substance,” is $5,000 to $30,000.
The Alabama Constitution specifically bars setting unreasonably high bails: “That all persons shall, before conviction, be bailable by sufficient sureties, except for capital offenses, when the proof is evident or the presumption great; and that excessive bail shall not in any case be required.”
Pickens County District Attorney Chris McCool levied 307 charges of “Unlawful Distribution of a Controlled Substance” in 2015 during its “War On Drugs,” but didn’t charge a soul with the crime in the previous year, state court records show.
In contrast, nearby Marengo County, which has a similar population, demographic and income level, reported just 11 arrests for “Unlawful Distribution of a Controlled Substance” this year, and 31 in 2014. The county court reported $5,300 in revenue from bails and bonds for all criminal arrests in 2014. In 2015, it made $1,031, according to the county’s circuit court.
McCool did not respond to BOSSIP’s requests for comment.
Missouri state lawmakers have already proposed capping the amount of revenue that a municipality can squeeze from its residents through traffic tickets, according to the New York Times. Legislators proposed the traffic ticket bill after residents complained of heavy-handed policing and fines in the wake of police shooting unarmed Ferguson, Mo. teen Michael Brown.
Mother of two Tabitha Whitten, 33, said she was wrongly arrested and charged for trafficking synthetic marijuana. Whitten said she’s had to sell her car, boat and her camper in order to make her $40,000 bail.
But not before she said she had a humiliating experience at Pickens County Jail: a guard forced her expose herself to him in exchange for food.
“They would give us a bag of donuts if we showed them our boobs and our butt,” Whitten said, adding that she was being underfed in jail and once found a bullet in the jail meat. “It’s awful. It’s violating. They are supposed to be law enforcement. They knew we were hungry and they used us for their advantage.”
Three jail guards were subsequently fired and indicted on theft and ethics charges.
Tabitha Whitten said she was wrongly arrested and charged with drug distribution in the “War on Drugs” in Pickens County, Ala.
NAACP officials told BOSSIP that they tried to visit the jail to confirm the conditions, but said Sheriff Abston denied their visit.
Whitten rejected the prosecution’s plea deal to serve a year in prison; she heads to trial in November.
Mugshots of Kendarian Little, Sandi Zacharias and Antonio Ball shortly after they were arrested in Sheriff David Abston’s “War On Drugs.”
Antonio Ball said he was walking to a relative’s house in a mobile home park last winter when he noticed a sheriff’s patrol car ride by him three times. He arrived at his family member’s house, and was playing with his four-year-old niece on the front porch when patrol cars barreled down the street and blocked the road. Three deputies got out, their guns drawn.
“They didn’t know my name until they got my wallet out of my back pocket,” Ball told BOSSIP.
Sheriff’s officers brought Ball to a police van parked behind an abandoned hospital. He waited there, with about a dozen other arrestees, before they drove to the Pickens County Jail. Ball and the rest of the people in the van were charged with felony drug distribution, as well as “Penalty Enforcement,” for allegedly selling drugs without paying taxes.
“There was mold everywhere,” Ball recalled. “Then we were taken to an overcrowded room. People were sleeping on the floors, on the table, up under the stairs.”
“The toilet was stopped up. We called them (corrections officers) to tell them to flush it. They said deal with it.”
A judge later set Ball’s bail at $40,000, and his mother had to scrape up $500 to pay a bail bondsman to get him out of lockup. Ball, who has no prior arrests, said although he’s unemployed, he has to find a way to make monthly payments
“It has affected me,” Ball said. “I really didn’t have any money anyway. It’s even more difficult.”
Ball said his niece has been traumatized from witnessing the sheriff’s officers drawing guns on her uncle.
“When I was in jail, she kept saying ‘they shot him! They shot him!’ She’s four.”
Ball denies selling or using drugs, and said the arrest meant he missed a chance to go to Little Rock, Ark. to get his truck driver’s license.
He said it’s common knowledge that the sheriff has targeted black men in the past, and the experience has ruined his life.
“They never read me my rights, and I ain’t seen a warrant yet,” Ball said. “I owe the bail bondsman $2,000 more dollars, and I don’t know where I’m gonna get that from.”
High school senior Kendarian Little, 18, said sheriff’s officers surrounded his house on Feb. 26 after he’d come home from school. The officers barged in, searched the place, and then hauled him away in handcuffs.
“They didn’t show me nothing, no type of warrant,” Little told BOSSIP. “They didn’t read me my rights until the next day, when I was in jail.”
Little was also charged with felony “Unlawful Distribution of a Controlled Substance,” and “Penalty Enforcement.”
Little said things got worse once he got to the Pickens County Jail: black mold covered the place, and it was so overcrowded that he was forced to sleep on a table with a blanket.
One of the jailers told Little that the mass arrests were little more than a racket.
“They kept saying it,” Little said. “That it was a money scheme, so we can’t do anything about it.”
He denies the charges and said the sheriff has no evidence, but he said a judge still set his bail at $40,000. His mother, Katina Levida, a student and single mother, had to set up a payment plan with a local bail bonds man, who put up $4,000, or 10 percent, to bail her son out.
“We don’t have anything,” the mom said. “I have a son with Down’s Syndrome. I have bills. I am a single parent doing all of this.”
“I had to come up with money that I don’t even have.”
Pickens County Sheriffs Department, Pickens County Shopper, Facebook
