Is it racism or justice? The legal tangle behind a Black woman's six-year sentence for voter fraud.

The story of Tennesseean Pamela Moses receiving a six-year prison sentence for submitting a form with incorrect information while trying to regain her voting rights begins with her past criminal record and ends with a judge who did not believe her.

It has re-opened the debate about discriminatory sentences and disenfranchisement of Black voters. The case also pivots on one question: Is she being unfairly punished for someone else’s mistakes?

Paste BN has reviewed court records and talked with experts and parties involved in the case to piece together what led to the Memphis resident's six-year sentence.

Moses’ situation is complex and dates back more than two decades. A guilty plea in a felony case first stripped her of her right to vote in 2000, she regained it, and lost it again in 2015, after pleading guilty to two more felonies.

The recent case hinges on what happened in 2019, when she tried to restore her voting rights, and asked a probation officer to complete the certificate that starts the process in Tennessee. The officer certified that Moses had completed probation for the crimes impacting her voting rights, so Moses submitted the certificate and registered to vote.

That’s where things begin to unravel.

The officer was wrong. Whether Moses was aware of the mistake – or even engineered it – became the crux of the legal case that led to her six-year sentence, an outcome she now is seeking to overturn.

Moses said she didn’t know, and, from jail, told Paste BN: “The truth is about to come out.” Prosecutors said she did know because by the time she filed the certificate she had already gone to court over the length of her probation and received a court order that said it would not end until 2022.

The jury unanimously sided with the prosecutors.

An attorney who represented Moses during her sentencing said Moses thought the court order was incorrect, which is why she had asked the probation officer to check. He said the case should have been dismissed from the get-go.

Sentenced: Pamela Moses sentenced to six years in prison for illegally registering to vote

Once convicted, two things heavily influenced the sentence that touched off the public outcry: Moses’ prior criminal record and Tennessee laws aimed at punishing repeat offenders.

Mitchell D. Brown, voting rights lawyer with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, said enhanced sentences for those with criminal records disproportionately affect Black voters because their neighborhoods are more heavily policed, and they are incarcerated at higher rates.

“They have the proverbial scarlet letter,” he said. “Courts have decided that they don’t really matter, and no one is going to care about them.”

Challenges of tough-on-crime laws and their disproportionate impact in Black communities, including on voting rights, are not new to Tennessee.

The state is second only to Mississippi in the proportion of adults temporarily or permanently banned from voting over felony convictions, according to estimates of The Sentencing Project. Its 2020 report estimates that 9% of the state’s voting age population, more than 450,000 people, can’t vote for that reason. The percentage is 21% among Black Tennesseans. 

The process Moses used to try to restore her voting rights also is under a legal challenge. A Tennessee NAACP lawsuit calls it: unequal, inaccessible, opaque and error-ridden, noting that it does not include a right to appeal if an officer declines to fill in the certificate. 

Tennessee goes further than most states with voting restrictions. It is one of a handful that issue lifetime voting bans for certain felonies based on a list of crimes that has grown over the years.

Read about: Tennessee's voting restoration laws

One of the felonies Moses pleaded guilty to in 2015 had been added to that list in 2006:  tampering with evidence in a case related to stalking a Shelby County judge. As a result, she could never vote again.

But that ban was not the basis of her most recent conviction. She was not convicted of voting illegally or registering to vote illegally, either, even though she voted six times while ineligible. 

For filing the certificate, she was convicted of marking or consenting to a false entry on her voter registration. That is the crime that led to her six-year sentence. 

A review of a database of voter fraud cases compiled by the Heritage Foundation indicates the charge has rarely been used, making comparisons difficult. The database includes over 1,000 cases dating as far back as 1988.

Tennessee courts have only convicted two people with false entry and no other state has convictions under that same charge, according to the information in the database. 

One of the Tennesseans convicted was Howard Allen, who pleaded guilty in 2005 and was sentenced to two years of probation. It’s unclear if he had a criminal record. The second was Vancey Voorhies, a poll worker who cast a ballot for an ill elderly cousin at the cousin’s request. She had no criminal background and was eligible for pretrial diversion.

What led to the six-year sentence?

Moses was sentenced to six years and a day in prison on Jan. 31, with Shelby County Criminal Court Judge W. Mark Ward saying he would consider putting her on probation after nine months if she met conditions such as staying out of trouble while in prison.

One factor in that long sentence is a Tennessee law imposing harsher punishments on those with a criminal record. Because Moses had three prior felony convictions, Tennessee mandates at least a four-year sentence for false entry.

Judges do have some leeway. They can consider mitigating factors that might suggest a lower sentence within the mandated range, such as the defendant playing a minor role in the offense or acting under strong provocation. But they also can weigh enhancements that might justify more time behind bars. 

Miriam Aroni Krinsky, founder of Fair and Just Prosecution, said sentencing enhancements have led to mass incarceration, wasting billions of dollars and destroying lives and communities, all without making society safer.

“This case, for good reason, calls into question whether a just result was achieved,” she said. 

More coverage: The New York Times reports Pamela Moses' sentence

Another factor that led to a longer sentence for Moses was that in 2006 Tennessee increased punishments for some voter fraud crimes following a Memphis election voter fraud scandal involving ballots cast for dead voters. The state Senate voted to void that election.

False entry was reclassified the following year from a felony punishable with one to six years to one punished with between two and 12 years.

In addition to the three felonies, Moses had more than a dozen misdemeanors. In 2000, she had pleaded guilty to a felony of aggravated assault and eight misdemeanors, including harassment, perjury and assault. In 2014, she was convicted of misdemeanor theft. 

Then, in 2015 she pleaded guilty to tampering with evidence and forgery, both felonies, and misdemeanor perjury, stalking, theft and escape.

According to court records she stalked a judge who had declared her in contempt of court, fabricated a judicial complaint form against the judge, forged a notary public's signature and created a false notary seal to make the form appear official. She also jumped out of a police car on the interstate. 

Guilty plea:The outcome of Pamela Moses' judge stalking case

In his sentencing order, Ward highlighted Moses' prior criminal convictions beyond the three felonies, namely the misdemeanors. He added that she had a prior probation violation – she had missed mandatory check-ins with her probation officer. And he noted that she had committed the false entry voter registration crime while on probation. 

He also considered the mitigating factor that the voter registration crime didn’t cause bodily injury. 

What the judge didn’t consider, based on the sentencing order, was that Moses’ tampering conviction meant she was banned for life from casting a ballot.

Blair Bowie, a voting rights lawyer at the Campaign Legal Center who was helping Moses, said that fact wasn’t used because the law is obscure and none of the officials who completed her certificate, or the corrections official who later said the certificate was wrong, had noticed it.

One option before Ward would have been probation. But, in his order, he said Moses had committed many offenses while on bail or probation and that he thought it was extremely likely that she would reoffend. He said Moses criminal record showed she had a clear disregard for the law, so confinement was necessary.

Ward also said Moses lacked candor in her testimony.

Contacted by Paste BN, Ward said in an email that a judge’s ethical requirements make it inappropriate to comment on a case still pending before the judge. A hearing on Moses’ motion to request a new trial is scheduled for Feb. 25.

Attorney Bede Anyanwu, who started representing Moses after the jury found her guilty, said the judge should have considered that most convictions in Moses’ record were old, in addition to the fact that this crime did not involve violence. “The judge was extremely biased,” he said.

Shelby County District Attorney General Amy Weirich called the situation “unfortunate” in a statement emailed to Paste BN, but said the judge followed the law in sentencing Moses. Weirich noted that she had offered Moses an out instead of the jury trial, where she was convicted.

“I gave her a chance to plead to a misdemeanor with no prison time,” she said.

Bowie said she remains concerned about the chilling effect Moses’ case could have for people trying to get their voting rights back.

“This is the first time I’ve seen a prosecution for someone trying to restore their vote,” she said, “and that’s a scary prospect.”

Authorities didn't prevent Moses from voting

When Moses pleaded guilty to tampering with evidence in 2015, she lost her voting rights forever. But she was never pulled from the voting rolls and went on to vote six times. 

Moses said she did not know she couldn’t vote.

This was one of the statements the judge in her most recent case did not buy. Claiming ignorance, Ward said, was inconsistent with her intelligence and sophistication, noting that she prepared legal filings and her knowledge of the law was beyond a layperson’s.

Bowie said laws are confusing even for smart people – and lawyers. She said Moses had received a new registration card after she ended up in a new precinct when boundaries were redrawn, part of what Bowie described as strong evidence that Moses didn’t know she wasn’t eligible to vote.

Criminal court clerks in Tennessee are required to notify the county election commission when someone is convicted of a felony. Whether that happened in Moses’ case is unclear.

Joe Wm. Young, II, Shelby County’s chief deputy administrator of elections, said in a 2020 letter that the court failed to send them a judgment sheet – a document containing sentencing information for a specific charge – dated Feb. 26, 2016. Kevin Phipps, public information officer at the Shelby County Criminal Court Clerk Office, told Paste BN they did send the commission the sheet for one of the felonies, the forgery charge, on that date.

That felony would have rendered Moses ineligible to vote until she served her sentence for it. A judgment sheet for the conviction for her other 2015 felony, tampering with evidence – the one that made her permanently ineligible – was not included.

Bowie said there is a separate process where a few times a year the elections division in Nashville cross checks the statewide rolls with the department of corrections' database and flags matches to the county elections offices. 

“It is unclear to me how each level of this process continually failed to flag Ms. Moses' registration or why the county never removed her until 2019,” she said.

Referring to training materials from the Tennessee Elections Division, Bowie said when county offices purge voters with felony convictions from the rolls, they send a notice to the voter, stating the reason for it. 

If Moses had been taken off the rolls after her conviction, she should have been notified about the loss of her voting rights.

The Shelby County Election Commission did not respond to questions about why Moses wasn’t taken off the rolls.

A long-shot bid for mayor put her on the radar

Moses might never have wound up in trouble were it not for her ambition to become mayor of Memphis. In the spring of 2019, she launched a campaign in a long-shot bid. 

Facebook posts said she wanted to decriminalize marijuana and push for movies and entertainment that are positive in the city. One post read: “I plan to clean the city from top to bottom and work with ethical elected officials to promote prosperity and hope!”

Her campaign website said she wanted to create more living wage jobs, improve schools and get guns off the streets. 

To run for office in Tennessee, a person convicted of a felony needs to petition a court for the restoration of their full rights of citizenship. Moses did that in April 2019. When the state answered, saying she was still on probation, she filed a motion with the judge overseeing her probation. 

After a hearing, the court issued an order saying her probation didn’t end until 2022. That same day, the Election Commission responded to her petition to be certified as a candidate, asking her to file records showing that her rights of citizenship had been restored.

Moses sued the Election Commission, but she was never certified as a candidate. Instead, on Aug. 29, 2019, the commission referred her to the district attorney general for suspected voter fraud.

A few days later, Moses went to the probation office and received what turned out to be an erroneous clearance. 

It remains unclear why the probation officer completed the certificate with inaccurate information. The certificate says the felonies Moses had completed probation for in February 2018 were tampering with evidence and perjury. But perjury was a misdemeanor. Forgery was the second felony.

It’s also unclear who wrote that. Dorinda Carter, spokesperson for the Tennessee Department of Correction, said in an email that the officer did not fill out the charges. Moses’ attorney said her client didn’t write anything on the form.

The bottom line, according to Carter, is that the officer failed to conduct a thorough review of all official documents.

In the hearing that stretched from Dec. 10 to Jan. 26, Judge Ward would say that Moses tricked the probation department. But her attorney, Anyanwu, said she couldn’t have tricked the officer because she is not the one holding her file. He said Moses just used the information provided to her.

“This case should have been dismissed from the get-go,” he told Paste BN. 

The same day that the corrections officer filled in the certificate, on Sept. 3, Moses filed the document with the Election Commission, which touched off the chain of events that would lead to her conviction.

Shelby County Election Commission sent the certification to the Division of Elections, which is in charge of verifying that such certificates comply with the law. A commission staffer told a state lawyer that Moses was denied the right to be on the ballot for mayor because she was on probation and that their own lawyer said the certificate was incorrect and needed to be declined. 

The state lawyer wrote back saying Moses was permanently ineligible to register to vote because of the tampering conviction. It was the first time anyone seemed to realize that was the case.

The commission denied Moses’ petition to register to vote and told her that absent a law change, future attempts to register could be considered a felony.

Moses says she doesn’t want to comment much until the motion for her new trial comes up next week. Of her January conviction and sentence, she added: “I was in front of an unfair tribunal.”

Maria Perez and Monique O. Madan are reporters on Paste BN’s national investigations team. Maria can be reached at maria.perez@usatoday.com and on Twitter @mariajpsl. 

Contributing: Micaela Watts, The Commercial Appeal