which seemed like a disproportionately high number since more absentee ballots were cast in Perry than in Jefferson County, which had more than 45 times the number of residents of Perry County. At Sessions's suggestion, the FBI watched the Marion post office during the September 1984 primary election, where they saw the Turner, his wife Evelyn and Spencer Hogue Jr. drop off absentee ballots; election officials, under a court order, marked those envelopes and identified 75 altered ballots in the group of ballots dropped of by PCCL officials. FBI agents took the marked ballots and confronted many of the voters with allegations of "ballot tampering." Of the eighteen counties counted as part of the Black Belt, the investigation concentrated on the five counties which had posted the largest gains in black elected officials. In a later interview, Evelyn Turner explained the alterations were performed at the request of the voters, assistance permitted by state law. Nevertheless the prosecution moved forward and Turner, his wife Evelyn, and Hogue, who became known as the Marion Three, were indicted on twenty-nine counts by a Mobile-based federal grand jury on January 25, 1985 based on allegations of ballot tampering in the September 4, 1984 primary election. The maximum punishment was 115 years in prison and $40,000 in fines. Turner's brother Robert, a lawyer who was part of the defense team for the Marion Three, alleged in 2016 that Sessions had jailed the Marion Three to send a message: "You got a person like Albert Turner that's out front, spearheading all these voter registration drives, why not put him in jail and see how many people get scared?" The Marion Three were defended by a team of lawyers experienced in civil rights litigation, including Turner's brother Robert, J. L. Chestnut, Lani Guinier, James Liebman, Deval Patrick, and Hank Sanders. During the grand jury investigation in October 1984, more than two dozen subpoenaed witnesses, many of them black senior citizens familiar with segregation-era intimidation techniques, were bused more than to Mobile to be photographed, fingerprinted, provide handwriting samples, and testify before the federal grand jury. Grand jury records indicate that several of the questioned witnesses were so intimidated they would no longer vote in the future. The case moved to trial on June 19, 1985. The federal jury deliberated for three hours before handing down "not guilty" verdicts for all three defendants on all charges on