Perry County for four hours in the afternoon. In addition, many potential black voters in the Black Belt are elderly and/or illiterate due to inferior education, again limiting poll access. As a result, local civil rights organizations, including the Perry County Civic League (PCCL), began to register black voters for and assist them with absentee ballots. In 1979, Maggie Bozeman and Julia Wilder were convicted of absentee voter fraud in a 1978 election held in Pickens County. The verdict was reached by an all-white jury, and the pair were sentenced to four (Bozeman) and five (Wilder) years imprisonment, believed to be the strongest sentences handed out to-date for voting fraud in Alabama. The conviction was later upheld by the Alabama Supreme Court before being overturned in federal court, but the pair, known as the Carrollton Two, started to serve their sentences in January 1982 and were freed in November 1982 after spending 11 days in prison, with the balance of time served on work release in Tuskegee. The initial conviction, though, depressed black voter participation in Pickens County. The Marion Three State district attorney Roy Johnson convened a grand jury during the fall and winter of 1982–83 to investigate PCCL-led voter assistance programs and absentee ballots, but failed to obtain an indictment. Johnson took his suspicions to Assistant Attorney General William Bradford Reynolds, head of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice in October 1982, asking Reynolds to deploy federal marshals to supervise elections, and Reynolds demurred, saying it was not possible under the Voting Rights Act. In the summer of 1984, US Justice Department officials promulgated a new policy to "investigate political participants who seek out the elderly, socially disadvantaged, or the illiterate, for the purpose of subjugating their electoral will," applying it in a selective manner against civil rights activists seeking to register black voters in the Black Belt. At the time, Turner led the PCCL, and a rival group complained to the local district attorney that Turner and other PCCL officials were altering votes on absentee ballots. In the 1984 election, according to testimony from Jeff Sessions who was the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama from 1981 and testified about the election at a Congressional hearing in 1986 to decide whether to confirm him as a U.S. district judge, out of 4,000 ballots total in Perry County, 729 were absentee ballots,