Sheriff must be ready for queries on Nuwaubians

In what his spokesman last week called “the very near future” Clarke County Sheriff Ira Edwards is expected to issue what his spokesman called “a formal comment” about the influence a convicted child molester and leader of a quasi-religious black supremacist sect has had over the sheriff’s department.

Late last week, Chief Deputy Sheriff Jack Mitchell, commander of the Clarke County Jail, announced the end of an internal investigation, conducted with help from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, into alleged proselytizing by some deputies at the jail on behalf of Dwight “Malachi” York, leader of the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors. York is serving a 135-year sentence at a federal maximum security prison in Colorado for child molestation, racketeering, money laundering and other crimes. Some of the molestations occurred in an Athens-Clarke County residence.

The investigation began in March, when a former jail commander learned from federal prison officials that a letter from a Clarke deputy had been intercepted at the Colorado lock-up. Two deputies resigned shortly after the investigation began, and in July, five deputies with apparent Nuwaubian affiliations were placed on paid administrative leave.

At this time, sheriff’s department officials are reviewing results of the internal GBI-assisted probe, which included administration of some lie-detector tests, to determine whether jailers’ involvement with the Nuwaubians violated any jail policies or broke any laws.

Since the first public indications of Nuwaubian influence among deputies at the jail surfaced, this community has waited months for some indication of how wide that influence was spread in the sheriff’s department.

And now, with a months-long investigation wrapped up, what this community is hearing is that its sheriff, the man in charge of the department that was the subject of the probe, will at some point deign to offer up some comment on that probe.

Sheriff, you owe this community more than that.

If the investigation is, in fact, wrapping up, you should be able - and, more importantly, willing - to tell this community specifically when they can expect to hear about the extent to which a child molester was able to influence at least some of the people under your command.

More importantly Sheriff Edwards, you owe this community far more than the issuance of “a formal comment.”

You should be willing to stand in front of the media - and, by extension, the public - and answer any questions they might have about Nuwaubian influence at the jail. You should be willing to stand there for as long as it takes, and you should answer questions as fully and as honestly as is humanly possible.

Quite simply, Sheriff Edwards, you owe this community nothing less than an unfettered opportunity to determine whether you’ve been a careful and conscientious steward of the public trust invested in you when you were elected to office.

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