The Mobile County District Attorney’s Office has launched efforts to strip two elected constables of their positions, pointing to separate criminal cases involving each man. Prosecutors say both should be barred from holding the office, and they are pursuing removal through two different legal channels.
One case targets Larry Sheffield, 68, who was arrested earlier in 2014 in Spanish Fort on a murder charge. Sheffield is accused in the July 20 shooting death of a 52-year-old man outside a Baldwin County bar, though he has maintained the shooting was an act of self-defense. Prosecutors argue that the underlying charge disqualifies him from public service.
“We are alleging that the murder that he is charged with over in Baldwin County is a crime of moral turpitude,” Assistant District Attorney Keith Blackwood said. “Based on that fact, he shouldn’t be able to serve as a constable.”
The second case involves Mario Yow, 36, who was arrested in August 2012 on a felony cocaine trafficking charge. Yow went on to win election as a constable that November as a write-in candidate. In February 2014, he pleaded guilty to the trafficking charge in Mobile County Circuit Court and received a 10-year suspended sentence along with three years of probation.
Prosecutors contend that the conviction rendered Yow ineligible to serve. “We are alleging that he is basically usurping the office, that he was ineligible for office from the moment of that conviction,” Blackwood said. Yow, however, said he intends to fight the effort and take his case as far as possible.
“They’ll probably be more upset with me because I will take it all the way before a jury,” Yow said. “My constituents and I talk all the time. I still patrol the district that voted me in. Those people are really behind me because those people knew me before I became a constable and how active I was in the community.”
The two removals are moving forward under different procedures. In Sheffield’s case, prosecutors presented the matter to a grand jury, which reviewed it and recommended impeachment. That process is not a criminal proceeding but is handled in a similar manner. Sheffield can either resign, which would end the impeachment, or challenge it and go to trial, where a jury would decide whether he stays in office. Efforts to reach Sheffield, who was free on a $250,000 bail, were unsuccessful.
For Yow, the office is using a civil procedure known as quo warranto, appropriate because his conviction came after he was elected. Blackwood said his office was obligated to act once the situation was flagged. “Our office is tasked with pursuing this once it has been brought to our attention,” he said, noting that news coverage and another constable had raised the issue. Yow, too, has the option to resign, which would make the civil case moot. Both sides are entitled to a jury trial, though they can also agree to let a judge decide.