[1] Sutton was widely celebrated in 1998 for publishing over four years a series of articles that exposed corruption in the Marengo County Sheriff's Office; he received awards and commendations and was suggested as a candidate for the Pulitzer Prize.
[11] In 1998, Sutton received widespread acclaim for articles exposing corruption in the Marengo County Sheriff's Office; he always credited his wife, Jean, "with laboring over courthouse records".
He received death threats and lost circulation and $50,000 per year in advertising in his newspaper; a local church official told him to "lay off the sheriff".
After the favorable publicity received in 1998, he ran in District 72 of the Alabama House of Representatives as a Republican, but lost to the incumbent in the general election.
Alabama political reporter Chip Brownlee noticed and reprinted an editorial Sutton published in the February 14, 2019, issue of his newspaper.
Asked to explain what he meant by "cleaning up D.C.," Sutton suggested lynching: "We'll get the hemp ropes out, loop them over a tall limb and hang all of them.
[8] This is only one of a series of recent inflammatory editorials in The Democrat-Reporter;[23] according to state Sen. Bobby Singleton and Rep. Artis J. McCampbell, "He's been making those kind of racist epithets for a long time.
"[3] Under an anonymous byline, a 2012 editorial read, "What will happen when the Ku Klux Klan is taken over by black people trying to run from the federal government?"
A 2016 editorial called then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton 'a fat aft woman with a tubby tummy and jowls of a hog.
'"[8] He also called her "fat witch (or female dog)"[3] and "little Miss Piggy," and expressed gratitude to Russia for helping Trump get elected.
There are stories which publishing companies won't print about how the black people were banished into the wilderness of Africa because God hated them.
"[3] Alabama political columnist Kyle Whitmire, who had worked at The Democrat-Reporter as a young man, published a column in which he speculated that Sutton, 80 at the time of the editorial's release, had gone into sharp decline since the death of his wife in 2003 and might be suffering from dementia, alcoholism, or both.
"[31] On February 21, Elecia R. Dexter, an African-American with human resources and operations experience, as well as a degree in speech communications, replaced Sutton as publisher and editor of The Democrat-Reporter.