Pamela Moses Freed From Six Year Conviction For Trying To Register To Vote
Pamela Moses, the Tennessee woman who was sentenced to six years in prison for trying to register to vote before completing probation, has been freed from all criminal charges.
Last year, Moses was convicted after prosecutors said she violated a Tennessee law that requires people with felonies to complete all terms of their sentence, including probation and parole, before they can vote.
Moses maintains she was unaware she was ineligible to vote and was joined by a dozen community members on Feb. 4 at a press conference protesting the sentencing in Memphis. Attendees gathered in the midst of an ice storm, holding signs like, “Trying to Vote is Not a Crime” and “Justice for Pamela.” [LINK]
Amy Weirich, the Shelby county district attorney who prosecuted the case, released a statement on Friday (April 22), saying Moses “will not be tried a second time on the felony charges of illegally registering to vote.”
Moses is still banned from voting.
“In the interest of judicial economy, we are dismissing her illegal registration case and her violation of probation,” Weirich said, according to Yahoo News, adding that Moses has been barred from “voting in Tennessee as a result of her 2015 conviction for Tampering with Evidence.”
The D.A. also claims the “original offer to the defendant Pamela Moses was a guilty plea to a misdemeanor and no time to serve.”
“She rejected that offer and asked for a jury trial. At the conclusion of the week-long trial, the jury convicted her on the felony charge of false entry on permanent voter registration,” Weirich added. “She was taken into custody and spent 75 days in jail before Judge Ward granted her motion for new trial. In total, she has spent 82 days in custody on this case, which is sufficient.”
According to the Memphis Commercial Appeal, Just City Executive Director Josh Spickler said considering the spike in violent crime in the Memphis area, Moses’ “paper case” should not have even been prosecuted, let alone reach a conviction and sentence to this extent.
“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…convict this woman for trying to vote,” Spickler said.
In 2015, Moses pleaded guilty to two felonies and three misdemeanors, which led to her receiving probation for seven years. The felony convictions made her ineligible to vote in Tennessee permanently.
The sentencing judge accused Moses of deceiving officials but she argued that she believed her voting rights had been restored when she researched voting in 2019.
"This is the very definition of a nonviolent crime," Spickler said in an earlier interview with the Commercial Appeal. "It involves paper, the only things that happened that were criminal, potentially, were things written on pieces of paper. The travesty here is that what happens next is, she can appeal, and it sounds like she probably will, but she's gonna be in jail or prison unless something remarkable happens."
According to The Guardian, in 2019 Moses ran for mayor of Memphis before being told by Shelby County Elections officials she couldn’t appear on the ballot because of her felony conviction. While looking into her eligibility, the officials also realized Moses hadn’t been taken off the voting rolls.
Moses subsequently went to court and asked a judge to clarify whether she was still on probation, and the court confirmed that she was.
After that, Moses went to the local probation office and asked an officer to figure out if the judge had calculated her sentence correctly. The officer then confirmed her probation had ended via a certificate and Moses submitted it to local election officials along with a voter registration form.
An official at the corrections department later contacted the election officials and said that Moses was still serving an active felony sentence and was not eligible to vote, admitting that the officer made an error. Moses was later charged, and sentenced, for trying to register to vote, not for casting a ballot.
