She was told she could vote again after felony convictions.

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She was told she could vote again after felony convictions.

Postby admin » Sun Feb 06, 2022 1:21 am

She was told she could vote again after felony convictions. Now she’s in prison for trying.
by Timothy Bella
The Washington Post
2/4/22 4:00 p.m. EST

Memphis activist Pamela Moses was sentenced to six years and one day in prison this week. Moses, who was convicted of trying to illegally register to vote, was told by officials in 2019 that she had regained her voting rights. They later acknowledged that they had made a mistake. (Youtube/WREG)

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Pamela Moses said she had taken all the steps to restore her voting rights in Tennessee.

Moses, a Black Lives Matter activist and former Democratic mayoral candidate in Memphis, had an extensive record of felony convictions, including a conviction for tampering with evidence that caused her to permanently lose her voting rights in the state. To restore rights that she says she didn’t know she had lost when she pleaded guilty, the corrections department and county election commission both signed off on Moses’s voter registration application in 2019 certifying that her probation had ended, granting her full voting privileges once again.

But there was a problem: The officials who signed off on Moses being eligible to vote acknowledged they made an error in saying her probation was over, meaning her voting rights had not been restored. So when the 44-year-old Black woman submitted the certificate as part of her voter registration, she was charged with trying to illegally register to vote.

After she was convicted of the voting error last November, Moses was sentenced this week to six years and one day in prison.

“I relied on the election commission because those are the people who are supposed to know what you’re supposed to do,” she told WREG before her sentencing. “And I found out that they didn’t know.”

Her sentencing Monday has been decried by critics as a much harsher penalty than those in other recent voting fraud cases involving conservative White men. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund tweeted that the case captured how “there are two criminal justice systems in America.”

“This case is one about the disparity in sentencing and punishment — and one that shouldn’t have happened,” Bede Anyanwu, her attorney, told The Washington Post on Friday. Anyanwu, who said Moses plans to appeal, added, “It’s all very, very disturbing.”

Moses has maintained that she thought her voting rights were restored when she received a letter saying as much, noting in court, “I did not falsify anything.” Her defense only angered Criminal Court Judge W. Mark Ward, who said she had intentionally deceived probation officials to restore her voting rights.

“You tricked the probation department into giving you documents saying you were off probation,” Ward said in court.

Neither Ward nor a spokesperson with the Shelby County District Attorney’s Office, which prosecuted Moses’s case, immediately responded to requests for comment Friday. Ward said he would consider placing Moses on probation after nine months of her sentence if she maintains good behavior and completes programs while in prison, reported WHBQ.

The Tennessee case is expected to add to rising national tensions surrounding voter suppression and disenfranchisement, Janai Nelson, the associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told MSNBC. Moses has been likened to Black people such as Hervis Rogers and Crystal Mason, who’ve faced years in prison over mistakes about their voting eligibility.

“It points to everything that is wrong in our democracy,” Nelson, who is not involved in the Moses case, told host Rachel Maddow. “It’s a confluence of racial discrimination and voter suppression.”


Legal Defense Fund
@NAACP_LDF
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Pamela Moses, a Black woman, has been sentenced to six years in prison because of a voting error. Meanwhile, white individuals who are known to have committed blatant voter fraud have only received probation.
There are two criminal justice systems in America.
8:38 PM Feb 3, 2022


Moses’s sentencing comes weeks after the year-long Democratic push for federal voting rights legislation died in the Senate, as Republicans blocked an elections bill for the fifth time in six months and Democrats failed to unite their caucus behind a plan to rewrite the Senate’s rules and pass it anyway. The push from Democrats would have restored portions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that were struck down in recent years by the Supreme Court, and would have established new national standards for federal elections, including minimum requirements for early voting, mail-in voting and other methods making it easier to cast ballots.

As former president Donald Trump and his allies have continued to make baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, several notable instances of voter fraud among White male Republican voters from the 2020 presidential election have emerged. Las Vegas GOP voter Donald Kirk Hartle was charged and convicted last year for forging his late wife’s name to vote with her ballot, after he alleged that someone else had stolen her ballot. Hartle was sentenced to probation.

Similar instances happened in Ohio and Pennsylvania, where GOP officials and voters admitted to casting ballots for their dead parents — cases in which the men received probation and no more than three days in jail.

The voting case involving Moses, however, was different and complicated, in more ways than one. Moses had 16 previous felony convictions, according to a news release from Shelby County District Attorney Amy Weirich (R).

Anyanwu said some of the counts against Moses came decades earlier, when she was in her 20s, and he said she was forced to plead guilty in some of the cases “given the fact that she is a lady of limited resources.”

“She, like some of my clients, plead guilty because they don’t have the money to fight these battles,” he said.

One of the most serious incidents was when Moses pleaded guilty in 2015 to a 10-count indictment, including perjury and tampering with evidence. She allegedly stalked and harassed a Shelby County judge between February and March 2014 by impersonating a lawyer and notary public in an effort to file a complaint against the judge, according to the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Moses was given an eight-year suspended sentence, and the judge in that case ordered that she serve the time on probation.

Although the charge of tampering with evidence is one of the few felonies in Tennessee that causes someone to permanently lose their voting rights in the state, she told the Guardian last year that no one explained to her that pleading guilty meant she’d be ineligible to vote.

“They never mentioned anything about voting,” she told the outlet. “They never mentioned anything about not voting, being able to vote … none of that.”

Moses went on to found a local Black Lives Matter chapter in Memphis and eventually launched a long-shot bid to become the city’s mayor in 2019. But it wasn’t until she found out she couldn’t be on the ballot that she realized she was still on probation and ineligible to vote. After the court confirmed that she was still on probation, Circuit Court Judge Felicia Corbin Johnson said she was “going to allow the criminal court to make an official determination of whether or not Ms. Moses’s sentence has been completed and expired,” according to WATN.

What happened next changed Moses’s life. On Sept. 3, 2019, Tennessee Department of Correction officials filled out an application for Moses to have her rights restored — and it was approved. Staff members from the Shelby County Election Commission also signed off on the application.

Then, the next day, the Department of Correction wrote a letter to the Shelby County Election Commission noting that it had made a mistake in restoring voting rights to Moses. Officials did not offer an explanation for the mistake.

“This attestation was made in error,” wrote Lisa Helton, then the acting assistant commissioner for the department.

The Shelby County Election Commission acknowledged the error in an August 2020 letter from Joe Young, the chief deputy administrator of elections, in which officials said Moses was notified that she remained permanently ineligible.

“Very little of this has made any sense whatsoever,” Shelby County Election Administrator Linda Phillips told WREG last year. “The fact is she was convicted of a felony which has permanently terminated her right to vote.”

But Moses has maintained that no one ever told her that the good news she received in September 2019 was reversed the next day. She refused to take a plea deal for the charges this time because she thought she had done nothing wrong, Anyanwu said. Yet she ended up being convicted last year.

At her sentencing hearing in December, Ward, a 2004 appointee of then-Gov. Phil Bredesen (D), criticized Moses, saying she had “voted six times as a convicted felon” after her 2015 conviction. Character witnesses supporting Moses remarked that “it would be a shame to waste her good traits which can be so beneficial to her family and her community by being in a jail,” according to local media.

Anyanwu said Moses was floored when she found out about the six-year sentence. But she remains hopeful that the sentencing could be overturned on appeal, the attorney said. He is hoping her case can return to court by June. Until then, she remains optimistic that her fight isn’t done, he said.

“She believes the sentencing was beyond the evidence that was presented,” he said.

Mike DeBonis contributed to this report.
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