The fact that Alabama’s voters have sent a Democrat to the Senate for the first time since Howell Heflin retired in 1997 is a stunner, exceeded in incredibility only by the events that led to it — not least, that the Republican candidate, Roy S. Moore, saw his already prodigious history of controversy grow during the campaign to include allegations that he had molested teenagers.
The least surprising thing about it all may be that the victorious Democrat is Doug Jones.
Before the special election last Tuesday, the largest of Jones’s historical moments, and perhaps still the most consequential, were the successful prosecutions of two of the Klansmen involved in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, nearly 40 years after the crime. Jones served as lead prosecutor.
Though he continued to be involved in some of Alabama’s highest-profile legal cases in private practice, the church bombing prosecutions were his last work for the federal government until he starts his new job in Washington.
Over the years, Jones, now 63, has remained a rare combination: Part bourbon-sipping Southerner and part New York Yankees-loving Democrat. He has often called in to discuss legal matters with Paul Finebaum, whose radio talk show is akin to a religious service for college football fans in the Southeast, and he has been a long-time friend of former US vice-president Joseph R. Biden, whose 1988 presidential campaign he worked on. Biden returned the favour with a rally appearance in October.
Jones was raised in a George Wallace-supporting family in Fairfield, a suburb of Birmingham built as a company town by US Steel and named for the Connecticut village that a company executive called home. Like pretty much every other breadwinner in Fairfield, Jones’ father worked in the steel mill, eventually rising to a management post.
His youth coincided with the height of the civil rights movement, just outside the city that was its crucible. Jones was a teenager when the first black students arrived at the town’s newly integrated schools. Jones’ efforts to help smooth out the school integration process earned him a 1972 nod as the Kiwanis Club Youth of the Year, his name projected in light on the side of a Birmingham skyscraper.
After graduating from the University of Alabama, Jones went to the Cumberland Law School in Birmingham. There he would cut class to sit in the balcony of the Jefferson County courthouse and watch what he still calls the trial of the century: The prosecution of Robert Chambliss, a Klansman who helped plan the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that killed four young girls.
Chambliss was the first man convicted in the bombing case. Bill Baxley, the state attorney general who led the prosecution, knew there were others involved. But with the passage of time and the challenging politics of such a case in Alabama, he feared that the others would never be tried.
After law school, Jones made a name in Birmingham legal circles and among the dwindling community of Alabama Democrats. He spent his first year working for Senator Heflin, a former State Supreme Court chief justice whom he still calls “Judge”. Next came several years as a federal prosecutor in Birmingham, followed by a long stretch as a defence attorney.
After Bill Clinton was re-elected US president in 1996, Jones achieved a long-held ambition when he was nominated and confirmed as United States attorney for the Northern District of Alabama.
His first test was a serious one. An extremist, Eric Robert Rudolph, planted a bomb at an abortion clinic in Birmingham that exploded, killing one person and injuring another. Although Rudolph would not be apprehended until after Jones left office, the investigation revealed Jones to be a skilled political infighter. He resisted a proposal by the FBI director to overhaul the structure of the bombing inquiry and won a compromise after weeks of negotiations.
But the challenge that obsessed him was one that he found out about just before taking office. One morning in 1997, while he was at home waiting for Congress to act on his appointment, he read in the paper that the FBI had reopened the church bombing case.
“It was just chilling,” he said. He told his wife that morning, “Now I know why I’m going back to this office.”
Jones eventually brought charges against two men, Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry. Acting as specially appointed state prosecutor, he won a murder conviction against Blanton just before he left office in 2001.
Immediately afterward, he decided to run for Heflin’s old seat, then occupied by Jeff Sessions. But money was tight, the terrorist attacks of September 11 had changed the political climate, and he abandoned the campaign before the primary to return to private practice.
The case against Cherry slogged through the court system, and in early 2002, the Alabama state attorney general asked Jones to come back, again as a special state prosecutor, to try the case. He won a conviction in that case, too — but not before creating a souvenir that he still keeps at his law office.
While his team was discussing trial strategy, he used as an impromptu whiteboard a large poster that he found sitting in the office. Notes about the formation of the jury that would convict a Klansman terrorist cover the back of the poster. On the front is a plea to voters to elect Doug Jones to the Senate in 2002.
— New York Times News Service
Alexander Burns and Campbell Robertson are American journalists who cover politics.
