BOSSIP Exclusive: Alabama Sheriff Arrests Blacks To Bring In Profits

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.”