District Attorney Robert Turner Jr. and his team are pushing through a backlog of criminal cases leading back to 2016 while addressing current crimes, including a surge in youth violence in Selma.
The focus of the DA’s office is on the worst of the crimes in the backlog first. And his office is taking an active role in community meetings with stakeholders discussing how to curb the increase in teen shootings in the last year that culminated with the death of a Selma High sophomore two weeks ago.
In an exclusive interview with the Selma Sun, Turner talked about his team’s efforts in the last 20 months since he took office to tackle the inherited backlog of cases that might have made crime victims think “the system forgot about them.”
“They weren’t forgotten about,” Turner said. But he acknowledged that witnesses have had to come to court on cases that date back as far as 2016.
“It is unfathomable for a crime victim’s family to have lost a loved one in 2017 or 2018, and here we are in 2024,” Turner said. Delayed justice isn’t fair to the accused either, he said.
Turner said his office had to put a system in place to hold themselves accountable and to deal with cases in an efficient and timely manner.
When Turner won the election in 2022 and took over as the 4th Judicial Circuit District Attorney in early 2023, he found stacks of old cases and a disorganized office.
Turner explained that in felony cases, the accused is entitled to a preliminary hearing. It is during this time the case may be bound over to a grand jury. “The problem we ran into is there were stacks and stacks of cases that had not yet gone to the grand jury,” Turner said.
Turner said the district attorney’s office has been “reconvening grand juries on a regular basis.” Turner reported that all the 2023 and 2024 cases have been presented to the grand jury, but his office is still not caught up on the backlog.
Homicide, attempted murder and sex cases were put in front of the line. “We definitely wanted to make sure we got those through,” Turner said. Next in line, “out of consideration for our local businesses,” were a number of retail theft cases, he said.
Each case is assigned to a specific assistant district attorney who can handle questions from defense attorneys and families. Victim services officers are assigned cases and deal directly with crime victims. “Everybody now knows which cases they are responsible for,” Turner said.
Turner said the office he inherited had no computers, so he installed “a really good interactive” case management software from an Alabama company used by many DAs.
Local repeat offenders are a problem, and Turner said his office is trying to identify these offenders and get them off the street.
Turner said he is concerned about a “surge” in violent crime committed by juveniles, some of whom are students in the local school system.
The death of a Selma High sophomore on Aug. 23 after being shot in the head two days before led Selma School Superintendent Zickeyous Byrd to call for a meeting of officials to discuss solutions. That discussion included the DA, the district judge, the mayor’s office, Selma police, the Selma Center for Non-Violence and several members of the mental health community who met at Selma High on Aug. 22 to discuss what can be done to curb the violence.
During the meeting, Turner said three fights took place on campus while the stakeholders met, showing the high tension and anger among teens. “There is a culture of violence and no grief counseling,” he said.
Turner said Walter’s death was a culmination of a year of fighting among a group of teens. Sixteen teens, including Walter, got into an on-campus fight last year, Turner said. Walter and at least one other member of that group of 16 has been shot since that fight. Another student was shot in April and survived. Threats of retaliation after the April shooting led to Selma High and the alternative school switching to virtual learning for nearly a week.
Turner suggested the city put a 9 p.m. curfew for children 17 years old or younger. There would be exceptions for young people who have jobs and kids accompanied by parents or legal guardians. Because of high school football and other sports on the weekend, the curfew would be raised to 10 p.m. Others exempted on weekends would be anyone participating in band or cheerleaders and such.
Turner said this would not be a permanent curfew, but “while we have retaliation going on and a lot of retaliatory fights” the curfew would be in effect.
Turner also said he feels that it is too easy for individuals to obtain semi-automatic weapons.
“I know in this country we have the right to bear arms, and I don’t have any problem with that,” Turner said.
But he said he takes issue with the fact that a citizen is no longer required to obtain a permit for a handgun. Turner said that was one more tool law enforcement and his office could use against perpetrators of crimes.
In the interview, Turner spoke about factors contributing to the district's crime problem, particularly in the Selma area. You can hear the full Turner interview on www.blackbeltnewsnetwork.com.
Publisher Cindy Fisher contributed to this report.
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