Backwoods Justice: The Alabama Way
Sheriffs like Sheriff "Red" Walker have always been a part of the Alabama disaster
I’ve seen this picture of my father countless times. He was dressed up for the annual Fourth of July Parade at Lake in the Woods circa 1970-something. It never occurred to me that his costume, impersonating Sheriff C.P. “Red” Walker, was based a real person until I did a casual Google search. And there he was. A man larger than life in local and state politics.
To this day in Alabama and the South, we still breed the strangest, meanest and probably some of the dumbest politicians, and the stereotype of the Southern sheriff is, unfortunately, based on real men like “Red,” known as one of Shelby County’s most powerful politicians, and Buford Pusser, made famous by the 1973 movie Walking Tall. Recently, the crimefighting Tennessee folk hero was exhumed and evidence points to the fact that he murdered his wife. Turns out he was a real gangster.
But back to Sheriff Walker. Called “Red” for his shock of red hair, Walker grew up in Alabaster, a small town where he opened a barbershop and met another barber named Jack Fiorella. A colorful character, Walker was a well-known and eventually got a hankering to run for state office. After his first term in the legislature, in 1959 he was appointed sheriff to fill a vacancy. As Shelby County’s longest serving sheriff, he stayed in office for twenty years and was known for his “backwoods justice.”
In other words, his buddies were men like Sam Fiorella, the son of his barber friend and a notorious gambler, who operated an illegal gaming house in Walker’s neck of the woods.
Fiorella was arrested in 1975 and held in the Shelby County jail, where the story goes, “Red” accommodated his every need, even running a phone line to his cell and bringing him steaks. According to legend, when a couple of FBI agents protested this special treatment, Walker arrested them. Who knows. Sounds like a bit of a tall tale to me, but you never know around here. Fiorella eventually went to prison at Maxwell Air Force base in Montgomery for federal obstruction of justice charges. In 1977, he was indicted for orchestrating a gambling operation from a telephone in prison.
Folks thought they’d seen a little bit of everything with Sheriff Walker until his last run for re-election when Walker arrested his opponent, the Probate Judge Conrad “Buddy” Fowler. He’d been feuding with Fowler for years. I imagine “Buddy” boy tried to enforce some boundaries and accountability for Mr. Backwoods Justice. Walker also threw the book at the coroner, but your guess is as good as mine as to why. Walker claimed both men were involved in a scheme to murder him, according to the New York Times article, “A Sheriff Sees a Plot to Kill Him.” (Other sources for this character sketch are Find My Grave (yes, I know), Bhamwiki, newspapers.com, and algen.org researched by Bobby Joe Seales.)
Walker also didn’t appreciate the press investigating his tactics, so he did what any good sheriff does and served an arrest warrant for two reporters from The Birmingham News while they were interviewing him for an article investigating his corruption. The article they published, despite their arrest, quoted former Shelby County prisoners who said they bought drugs from their jailers. The article also claimed the sheriff had used prisoners for construction work on his private property. Attorney General Bill Baxley dismissed the charges against the seven men Walker ended up jailing, and Walker won the election to continue his reign.
Today (it has been for decades actually), it’s Walker County where some of the most heinous and notorious of crimes occur at the hands of law enforcement. You only have to read about Tony Mitchell being frozen to death in 2023 in the Walker County jail to begin to understand what justice can look like in this state. You can listen to the podcast, “Secrets True Crime,” to get an inkling of the nefarious deeds done in this dark corner of the state. More people seem to disappear there than anywhere in Alabama.
And, as depressing as all of this is, you must watch the HBO film, The Alabama Solution, about our prison system here—we have the highest homicide, suicide and overdose rates in the nation. What’s so incredible about this film is the fact that so much of its video is shot on prisoners’ cell phones, detailing the gritty brutality of prison life from inside the prison walls. Co-producer Beth Shelburne also has a Substack, Moth to Flame, where she writes about justice, injustice and life in Alabama.
And if you want to understand this complicated state, Alexis Okeowo has done an magnificent job in her book, Blessings and Disasters, in which she reports and explores the origin stories of Alabamians, whether they were born here, immigrated here or were enslaved here, as she searched for the more nuanced values and character that define Alabama.
The bright spots? The activists, journalists, artists, academics, and good folks like the ones at Blue Dot who have posted the eye-catching billboards over the past year. We have the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery. For all of the C.P. “Red” Walkers then and now, we have Bryan Stevenson, Doug Jones who is running against Tommy Tuberville for governor (remember Jones beat Roy Moore in the Senate race), Joyce Vance with her wonderful newsletter Civil Discourse, Lee Hedgepeth, an investigative reporter for Inside Climate News and powerful storyteller, Lilly Ledbetter (read Grace and Grit and watch the movie, Lilly, on Netflix) and the quiet commitment to justice of her attorney Jon Goldfarb who also represented Tony Mitchell, and that, my friends, is what makes us such a complicated state and gives us hope for the future.
P.S. This is just of sampling of folks making good trouble in Alabama.
Copyright 2025
Rural hospitals are the backbone of Alabama communities. Right now, they’re struggling.
It’s important we raise awareness of this issue.
In my latest post, linked below, I describe the importance of rural hospitals and the challenges they are facing.
https://open.substack.com/pub/tannerhampton1/p/rural-hospitals-and-the-problems?r=72cltq&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay
As a European and a Scot living the US I find it quite astonishing to read about of this kind of frontier justice. It’s not so much there are bad law people but that they get away with so much. Thank you for this revealing essay.