A Baldwin County judge has rejected an emergency legal effort to compel Sheriff Huey “Hoss” Mack to more aggressively enforce Gov. Kay Ivey’s statewide “safer at home” order, ruling after a hastily arranged teleconference hearing that the petitioner had not shown a legal basis for the court to intervene.
Circuit Judge Clark Stankoski denied the writ of mandamus, which had asked the court to force Mack’s office to take direct enforcement action against businesses and religious organizations that were not complying with the statewide health order tied to the coronavirus pandemic.
In his ruling, Stankoski wrote that the petitioner “failed to present any evidence of a justifiable controversy for the court to decide,” adding that statements made by the sheriff, standing alone, did not amount to the kind of proof needed to prevail on the claims.
A writ of mandamus is one of the oldest tools in civil procedure — an order from a court commanding a public official to perform a duty the law requires. It is also a demanding one: the petitioner must show a clear legal duty, a clear refusal to perform it, and no other adequate remedy. That standard is why mandamus cases against sheriffs and other elected officers rarely succeed, and why the hearing in Baldwin County was arranged quickly — the order was set to expire within weeks, and the petitioner wanted a ruling before it did.
How the dispute began
The dispute traced back to a video Mack posted on social media days earlier, in which he said his office would not take law enforcement action against businesses or religious institutions that defied the order. Instead, he said deputies would simply notify violators that the order was in effect and leave enforcement to other regulatory bodies, such as the Alabama Department of Public Health.
That stance prompted Baldwin County consumer advocate Paul Ripp, who has a history of pursuing legal challenges against local governmental bodies, to file the emergency petition. In the filing, drafted by attorney Harry Still, Ripp argued that Mack’s public comments amounted to a “dereliction of duties” that risked creating a public health crisis in the county. The petition characterized the sheriff’s position as political activity directed against an unpopular order and argued Ripp had the same right as any Alabama citizen to see a legally adopted order enforced.
Mack’s position was not unique to Baldwin County. Sheriffs and police chiefs across Alabama and much of the country had publicly announced similar policies in the pandemic’s first spring, saying their deputies would inform and educate rather than cite or arrest, leaving closures and penalties to health departments with the statutory authority to enforce them. Supporters argued that arresting store owners over a health order was neither practical nor wise; critics answered that an order without enforcement is a suggestion, and that the burden fell on the businesses and congregations playing by the rules.
The sheriff’s defense
Mack’s office pushed back forcefully in a written response filed the night before the hearing, arguing Ripp had not met the legal burden required for a court to issue a writ of mandamus. The response, prepared by attorney Randall Hillman, argued that the sheriff is given wide discretion in carrying out the duties of his office, and that any statements he made about his preferred methods or strategies for enforcing state law fell squarely within that discretion. Hillman argued that such statements, on their own, could never support a claim of dereliction of duty or a failure to act.
During the emergency hearing, held by teleconference, Mack testified that his office had received only a handful of informal complaints about possible violations of the health order and that each one had been investigated and found unfounded. He said his decision against pursuing custodial arrests for order violations reflected a broader, collective policy shared among law enforcement agencies across the region, reached after consulting with the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama, the Alabama Attorney General’s Office, and the 12 police chiefs who lead departments throughout Baldwin County.
Mack also acknowledged, however, that Attorney General Steve Marshall was not informed of his enforcement plan before it was made public.
That coordination claim mattered to the sheriff’s case. If the decision to notify rather than cite was a deliberate, regionally agreed policy worked out with prosecutors and municipal chiefs, it looked less like one official’s defiance and more like ordinary law enforcement discretion exercised across an entire county. The acknowledgment that the attorney general had been left out of the loop cut the other way, underscoring the petition’s argument that the plan had been announced unilaterally.
Ripp, testifying in support of his own petition, conceded he had no specific evidence that Mack’s approach had caused a public health crisis, but said he and his wife both have underlying health conditions that put them at greater risk from COVID-19.
Attorney Harry Still pointed the court to guidance previously issued by the Attorney General’s Office, which advised Alabama law enforcement agencies that they are authorized to issue misdemeanor citations and take other action “as needed” to enforce state health orders.
That guidance was the sharpest edge of the petition. A state advisory saying officers are authorized to act is not the same as a duty to act, but it did undercut any claim that enforcement was legally forbidden — the sheriff’s strongest possible position. The dispute, in other words, was not about whether deputies could cite violators but about whether the public could force them to.
The conflict-of-interest objection
Stankoski also sustained an objection raised by Hillman concerning a potential conflict of interest, related to Mack’s ownership stake in a Robertsdale funeral home and a commercial real estate business, though the judge said he would issue a more detailed explanation of his ruling in a follow-up filing.
The objection addressed a question that had hovered over the case from the start: whether a sheriff with private business interests affected by pandemic restrictions could fairly decide how forcefully to enforce them. Funeral homes faced restrictions on gatherings; commercial property owners faced tenants unable to open. Ripp’s camp saw those stakes as disqualifying; Mack’s defenders called them incidental to any officer who also happens to be a businessman. By sustaining the objection, the judge kept the conflict issue from becoming part of the record on which the writ was decided.
The backdrop: a state reopening
The legal fight played out against a fast-changing backdrop at the state level. The same morning the writ was denied, Ivey amended her statewide health order, which had been set to expire May 14, to allow restaurants, close-contact service businesses and certain gatherings, including religious services, to resume operating under new restrictions and guidelines beginning the following Monday.
The timing drained much of the urgency from the case. The petition had been built around an order about to lapse, with the state moving that same week from broad stay-at-home instructions toward a staged reopening — retail at limited capacity, restaurants with spacing rules, houses of worship encouraged to observe guidelines. A court order compelling enforcement of a mandate that was dissolving days later would have had little practical life, and the judge’s finding of no justifiable controversy reflected that shrinking dispute.
The episode highlighted broader tensions across Alabama and the country in the spring of 2020, as local officials weighed how aggressively to enforce state pandemic restrictions on individual businesses and residents, often balancing public health guidance against concerns about government overreach and enforcement capacity.
Baldwin County made the tension sharper than most places. One of the fastest-growing counties in the state, it sits across Mobile Bay from the city of Mobile and has an economy built on construction, tourism and small business — sectors hit hardest by closure orders. Its sheriff, first elected in 2007, had built a reputation as a department head who ran his office on his own judgment, and his Facebook video had reached an audience far beyond the county line. For the businesses reopening that Monday, and for the residents weighing the risk, the courtroom exchange was a public accounting of who was actually in charge of the rules: the governor who wrote them, the health department that enforces them, or the sheriff whose deputies are the most visible arm of the law in the county.
Stankoski’s ruling closed the courthouse door on that question — at least in mandamus form. It did not say the sheriff’s policy was wise or unwise, only that a judge could not order a law enforcement officer to change his methods on the strength of public statements alone. The detailed follow-up filing he promised was expected to set out the reasoning more fully, and with the order amended and the county reopening, the emergency the petition had described was already passing.
For Ripp, a longtime Baldwin County gadfly whose suits against local governments have ranged from drainage disputes to development fights, the loss was the latest in a series of one-man campaigns to hold officials to the letter of the law. For Mack, it preserved the enforcement posture he had announced publicly and defended under oath. And for the county’s 12 police chiefs, whose departments had signed on to the same approach, the ruling effectively ratified it — no Baldwin County officer would be ordered into citation mode by a judge, whatever the next health order said.