Violent sheriff defends Ala. trooper accused of civil rights slaying

SELMA, Ala. – Six months before his death in June, former Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark, whose violent clashes with civil rights activists in Selma angered a nation, gave a statement defending a former state trooper accused of committing murder during a 1965 protest.
Clark said he was in nearby Marion watching the voting rights demonstration when it turned violent, and trooper James Bonard Fowler was justified in shooting Jimmie Lee Jackson because Jackson cut the trooper severely with a broken bottle.
“I think he had every right in the world” to shoot Jackson, Clark said in a statement.
Clark gave his statement to Fowler’s lead attorney in December he died on June 4. His statement never says he saw the shooting, but it was recently revealed in a filing and is part of a stack of documents for a judge to consider Thursday when he hears arguments from Fowler’s attorneys.
They argue that the murder indictment should be thrown out because prosecutors waited too long to bring charges and that crucial defense witnesses, like Clark, have died.
Perry County District Attorney Michael Jackson, no relation to the victim, said 42 years is not too long because new witnesses only recently became available.
“There is no statute of limitations on murder,” he said.
Fowler, 73, was indicted by a Perry County grand jury in May on first-degree and second-degree murder charges. He acknowledges shooting Jackson in a cafe on Feb. 18, 1965, when a voting rights march turned chaotic, but he says it was in self-defense when Jackson attacked him with a bottle and tried to grab his pistol.
Monuments and museums across Alabama describe Jackson as a martyr of the voting rights movement who was simply trying to stop troopers from beating his mother and grandfather.
His shooting led to the organization of the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march the next month. The marchers were beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma by Clark and state troopers in what became known as “Bloody Sunday.”
With federal protection, the march resumed later that month all the way to Montgomery, led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. It became a transforming moment in the civil rights movement, leading Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act. The new law allowed millions of blacks to register to vote in the South and ended the region’s history of whites-only government.
Fowler watched the change from the sidelines. He got kicked out of the troopers for beating a supervisor and lived quietly in southeast Alabama until his indictment.
FBI records of the case, closed for many years, now reveal that a state grand jury and a federal grand jury reviewed the shooting in 1965 and found no reason to charge Fowler.
Defense attorney Beck argues that the case can’t go forward 42 years later because so many critical witnesses, including doctors who treated Fowler and Jackson, have died.
Jackson, the county’s first black district attorney, said he reopened the case at the request of residents who felt Jimmie Lee Jackson never received justice. The district attorney said both sides are affected equally by the passage of time, but that’s no reason to drop the case.
“In order for the defense’s assertion that the delay was intentional by the state, the court would have to believe that the state intentionally placed its own ability to prosecute this matter in jeopardy so that ‘beneficial’ defense witnesses would be lost,” Jackson said.
In support of his view to let the case go forward, Jackson cites the conviction of two white men in 2000 for a Birmingham church bombing that killed four black girls in 1963. The bombing occurred at the height of civil rights protests in Birmingham.