In the Jefferson County jail in Birmingham one day last week, sheriff's deputies booked, mugged and fingerprinted an unusual prisoner: Alabama's Attorney General Silas Garrett, 41. Garrett's arrest, on an indictment for vote fraud in the June 1 Democratic primary, was another installment in one of the worst political scandals in Alabama history.
Murder in Phenix City. A few days after Reformer Albert L. Patterson won the Democratic nomination (which means election) for attorney general on June 1, a Jefferson County grand jury began investigating the possibility that someone had altered vote tallies in an attempt to defeat Patterson. Nominee Patterson, who had campaigned on a promise to shut down gambling and other vice in his wicked home town of Phenix City (pop. 23,000), prepared to testify before the grand jury. Before he could do so. he was murdered by a gunman in a Phenix City parking lot (TIME, June 28). Patterson's son John took his place as the nominee, and Governor Gordon Persons† shut down Phenix City gambling hells and honky-tonks.
Garrett. who cannot succeed himself in office, but who had backed an opponent of Albert Patterson, set out to investigate the murder. As his investigation got under way, he was brought before the vote fraud grand jury, grilled for 10½ hours. Eventually the jury indicted him and two other politicians for attempting to fix the primary in which the late Lawyer Patterson was nominated.
"A Very Sick Man." After he testified before the grand jury, Garrett dropped out of the public eye. Then, one day, Garrett's father, Judge Coma Garrett Jr., finally revealed where his son had gone: to John Sealy Hospital in Galveston, Texas for psychiatric care. Said Judge Garrett: his son's physician believed he was a "very sick man mentally." The judge also gave Alabamans the disquieting news that their attorney general had spent two months of his term (August and September 1953) in the Sealy Hospital undergoing mental care.
Last week, after he posted bond, Attorney General Garrett denied his father's statements about his mental condition. But Circuit Solicitor Emmett Perry filed a lunacy petition against the attorney general so that a court could pass on his mental condition, thus preventing it from becoming an issue in the vote-fraud trial. Two days later, just across the Mississippi state line near Waynesboro, Garrett's car plunged off the highway. His neck was broken, one elbow fractured and his left ear almost torn off. But doctors said the attorney general of Alabama will live to stand trial.
† Democratic brother of Major General (ret.) "Jerry" Persons, legislative assistant to President Eisenhower.