The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals declined to rehear the appeal of former Mobile County Sheriff Jack Tillman, a procedural setback his attorneys had largely expected and one that pushed the case toward the Alabama Supreme Court.
Tillman’s lawyers had regarded the petition for rehearing as a formality, the sort of motion filed chiefly because it must be filed before the next step is available. Its rejection cleared the way for them to take the matter up with the state’s highest court.
How Tillman left office
Tillman had departed the sheriff’s office the previous year after pleading guilty to two misdemeanor counts. The charges arose from two threads of a broader investigation.
The first concerned the Mobile County jail’s food fund. Under a long-standing arrangement in Alabama, sheriffs were permitted to keep as personal income whatever money was left over from state and county allowances for feeding inmates, an arrangement that persisted in various forms for decades and produced periodic scandals across the state. The handling of Mobile County’s fund drew the attention of investigators.
The second concerned Tillman’s own testimony in a matter involving his sister-in-law, a sheriff’s department administrator who had been charged in connection with a law enforcement seminar.
The guilty pleas ended his tenure as sheriff but not the legal proceedings, because Tillman continued to challenge the process that produced the charges.
The privilege question
The core of the appeal was an unusual claim about attorney-client privilege.
Tillman’s attorneys contended that his rights were violated when his former attorney, Bob Campbell, testified before the grand jury investigating him. In their view, a defendant’s own lawyer appearing before the grand jury that indicted him represented a fundamental breach.
Campbell, who appeared under subpoena, took a different position. His testimony, he maintained, did not violate the privilege at all. Its purpose, he said, was narrow and technical: to authenticate public records. Records custodians and the lawyers who handled them are routinely called for exactly that purpose, and authenticating a document is not the same as disclosing a client’s confidences.
The disagreement between those two characterizations was the whole case. If Campbell was doing no more than confirming that documents were what they purported to be, the privilege was untouched. If he strayed into anything he had learned in confidence from Tillman, the defense had a genuine grievance.
Why it mattered locally
The Tillman prosecution was among the more consequential public corruption matters in Mobile County in that period, involving as it did the county’s chief law enforcement officer and the administration of its jail. The office of sheriff in Alabama carries broad autonomy and, at the time, a set of financial arrangements that invited exactly this kind of scrutiny.
The jail food fund practice in particular would remain a live controversy in Alabama for years afterward, drawing lawsuits, legislative attention and eventually reform efforts aimed at ending sheriffs’ ability to pocket the surplus.
For Tillman, the immediate consequence of the appeals court’s decision was simply that the fight moved up one level. His attorneys had never expected the rehearing petition to succeed. What they wanted was the Alabama Supreme Court, and the denial gave it to them.