Black Woman’s Bid to Regain Voting Rights Ends With a 6-Year Prison Sentence

A Black woman who was sentenced last week to six years and one day in prison for trying to register to vote in 2019 despite having a felony conviction says she was the victim of complicated voting laws in Tennessee that appeared to confuse even election officials.

Prosecutors in Memphis said that accidentally or not, the woman, Pamela Moses, 44, broke the law. But Moses, a Black Lives Matter activist, and her lawyer say election officials gave her advice that they later corrected while she was seeking to have her voting rights restored.

Voting rights activists say Moses’ lengthy sentence underscores racial disparities in the criminal justice system when it comes to voting fraud cases — especially since white men who have been charged in more straightforward instances of voting fraud have received probation or just days of imprisonment.

Moses’ collision course with the justice system began when she decided she wanted to run for mayor of Memphis in the summer of 2019.

Local election officials told Moses then that she could not be on the ballot because of prior felony convictions, including a 2015 conviction for tampering with evidence. That felony conviction meant Moses would never be allowed to vote again, but officials did not tell her that at the time and advised her only to check her probation status, said Bede Anyanwu, her lawyer.

Moses was confused because she thought her probation was over, Anyanwu said. She still wanted to run for mayor, or at the very least vote in the upcoming election, so she went to find answers.

In September 2019, a judge told Moses that she was indeed still on probation. She remained skeptical and went to the probation office, where a probation officer told her she was actually done with her felony probation, records show. The probation officer signed off on her voting rights restoration form. Moses submitted the form to election officials.

Problems came one day later. The probation officer had made a mistake, and the Department of Correction sent a letter to the Shelby County Election Commission informing it that Moses was “still under an active felony sentence” and could not vote, records show.

Moses was then charged with perjury on a registration form and consenting to a false entry on official election documents. The former charge was dropped, because there was no false statement from Moses on the voting form, but she was convicted of the second charge in November and sentenced Jan. 31 to six years and one day in prison.

“This is a vendetta-type prosecution,” Anyanwu said Monday. He added that Judge W. Mark Ward of Criminal Court had “acted like a bully and slammed her” with a lengthy sentence.

Video of the hearing shows Moses telling Ward, “All I did was try to get my rights to vote back the way the people at the election commission told me.”

Ward responded, “You tricked the probation department into giving you a document saying that you were off probation.”

Ward said in an email that he could not comment because the case was pending.

Moses is in jail and could not be reached for comment, but she told WREG, a Memphis TV news station, in December that she “relied on the election commission because those are the people who were supposed to know what you know you’re supposed to do.”

“And I found out that they didn’t know,” she said.

Ward said in his sentencing order that Moses seemed “to have nothing but contempt for the law and acts as though she believes herself above the law.”

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“Perhaps some time in custody will serve as a period of reflection that will give the defendant the insight she needs in order to be fully rehabilitated,” Ward wrote. He added that he would consider placing her on probation after nine months.

Amy Weirich, the Shelby County district attorney, did not respond to several calls and emails seeking an interview, but she said in a news release that Moses had 16 prior criminal convictions, including misdemeanor counts from 2015 of perjury, stalking and theft under $500.

In the hearing, Moses said that she did not commit those crimes and pleaded guilty only to avoid jail time, according to the judge’s sentencing order. Anyanwu said she was also struggling financially at the time and could not afford to pay for a lawyer.

Moses voted in at least six elections between 2015-18, after she had been convicted of a felony, according to the sentencing order

Because Moses was registered to vote before being convicted of a felony in 2015, a court clerk was supposed to notify election officials, who would remove her from voting rolls after the convictions.

But that did not happen, according to a letter sent by the Shelby County Election Commission to Weirich, the district attorney, on Aug. 8, 2020. The letter shows that election officials acknowledged the error, writing that the conviction notice for Moses “was not sent to the election commission by the court.”

Under Tennessee law, people convicted of certain felonies, including tampering with evidence, lose their voting rights forever, a measure that has drawn criticism from voting rights activists.

“Instead of welcoming people in, we are perpetually shutting them out, making it harder to vote, and in this instance, criminalizing their efforts to become active and civically engaged members of our society,” Janai Nelson, the associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said Monday.

Blair Bowie, a lawyer with the Campaign Legal Center who has been assisting Moses and Anyanwu with the case since October, said Monday that Tennessee’s complex voting laws had a “disparate impact on Black people.” The NAACP Legal Defense Fund echoed that sentiment, saying on Twitter that “there are two criminal justice systems in America.”

In October, Donald Kirk Hartle, a white Republican voter, was charged with two counts of voter fraud in Las Vegas after he forged his dead wife’s signature to vote with her ballot. He was sentenced in November to one year of probation, The Reno Gazette Journal reported.

Edward Snodgrass, a white Republican official in Ohio, forged his dead father’s signature on an absentee ballot in 2020 and was charged with illegal voting, NBC News reported. As part of a plea agreement, he served three days in jail last year, The Delaware Gazette reported.

Nelson compared Moses’ case to the cases of Hervis Rogers of Houston, a 62-year-old Black man who was charged with voting illegally while he was still on parole and faced up to 40 years in prison, and Crystal Mason, a Black woman in Tarrant County, Texas, who was sentenced to five years in prison for illegal voting, despite insisting that she did not know she was ineligible to vote as a felon on probation.

Anyanwu said Moses planned to appeal the judge’s sentencing.

Ward said in his order that Moses should have listened to the first judge who told her in 2019 that she was indeed still on probation.

Anyanwu disagreed.

“It was the probation department that gave the letter that she had expired her sentence, so she’ll be prosecuted for a mistake that was made by the state,” he said.