Black Lives Matter activist Pamela Moses was sentenced to six years behind bars after being convicted in November 2021 for illegally registering to vote in 2019.
On Monday, Jan. 31, Moses was ordered to spend six years and a day in prison for registering to vote in Tennessee while being ineligible to do so due to a felony conviction in 2015. That year, she pleaded guilty to two felonies and three misdemeanors, including tampering with evidence and perjury. As such, she was placed on probation for seven years.
A tampering with evidence charge is one of the few felonies in Tennessee that would prohibit individuals from maintaining their voting rights. However, Moses reportedly said she was unaware of this fact.
In 2019, the 44-year-old ran for mayor of Memphis when she learned she couldn’t be on the ballot after Shelby County Elections officials told her she wasn’t eligible to vote. Moses then visited a probation office, where an officer informed her that a certificate indicated the end of her probation. She was provided with the certificate, which the officer signed and filled out, and submitted it along with a voter registration form to local election officials.
Later, authorities reportedly contacted election officials and told them that the activist had an active felony charge; thus, the officer she spoke with made a mistake. Yet, she was still charged and sentenced for illegally registering to vote.
“I did not falsify anything. All I did was try to get my rights to vote back the way the people at the election commission told me and the way the clerk did,” she said at her hearing on Monday.
Criminal Court Judge W. Mark Ward, who believed she attempted to trick probation officers into restoring her voting rights, begged to differ.
“You tricked the probation department into giving you documents saying you were off probation,” he insisted.
Approximately a dozen community members gathered at the Shelby County Criminal Justice Center with Moses on Feb. 4 for a press conference protesting her sentencing. Participants of the meeting stood in the middle of an ice storm and held signs that said “Justice for Pamela” and “Trying to vote is not a crime.”
Just City Executive Director Josh Spickler said her “paper case” shouldn’t have been prosecuted, and her punishment shouldn’t have been so severe, given the rise in violent crime in Shelby County.
“And yet this system, those same elected officials, have used incredible amounts of resources in a time when there’s a backlog in this justice system unlike any we’ve seen before. They use resources to try and [now] convict this woman for trying to vote,” he said.
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund shared similar sentiments of dissatisfaction with Moses’ sentencing and expressed its thoughts about the punishment on Twitter.
“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,” they said. “There are two criminal justice systems in America.”
https://twitter.com/NAACP_LDF/status/1489443301828747277?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1489443301828747277%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=about%3Asrcdoc
