Attorney General Steve Marshall announced that former Mosses Mayor Walter Sylvester Hill is charged with rape, resulting in the revocation of his probation for a prior ethics conviction and in his return to prison.
Mosses is located in Lowndes County in central Alabama.
In January 2017, Hill pleaded guilty to a felony ethics charge of using his office for personal gain. His conviction resulted from multiple alleged schemes perpetrated by Hill to unlawfully direct more than $25,000 belonging to the Town of Mosses to his personal bank account or to pay his personal bills.
Hill was sentenced to five years in the Alabama Department of Corrections, serving approximately three months of incarceration, with the remainder of the sentence on community corrections followed by probation.
In November, while Hill was on probation, the Montgomery Police Department received a complaint that Hill forcibly raped a 12-year-old child in Montgomery County. Following Hill’s arrest on the rape charge, his probation officer issued a delinquency report to Montgomery Circuit Judge Greg Griffin, who set a revocation hearing on November 23.
Attorney General Marshall’s Office presented evidence and testimony from multiple witnesses, and at the conclusion of that hearing, Griffin was reasonably satisfied that Hill committed the offense. Griffin revoked Hill’s probation and ordered him to serve the remainder of his five-year prison sentence for the ethics conviction.
The ethics case was investigated by the Attorney General’s Office and prosecuted by its Special Prosecutions Division. The Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office is prosecuting the underlying rape charge against Hill. Although the defendant has been arrested on a warrant, the case has not yet been presented to a grand jury and he is considered innocent until proven guilty.
