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The founder of Black Lives Matter Memphis has been found guilty of multiple counts of illegal voting after she “tricked” probation officials into improperly restoring her right to cast ballots.
“You tricked the probation department into giving you documents saying you were off probation,” Criminal Court Judge W. Mark Ward told chapter founder Pamela Moses last week.
Moses illegally voted six times after she pleaded guilty to charges including evidence tampering, perjury, forgery, stalking, and theft under $500 in 2015, the Daily Mail reported on Sunday.
But the BLM activist claimed in court she did not know she was still on probation, which lasted for seven years, and thought that she had her voting rights reinstated in 2019.
“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 told the court at her sentencing hearing on Jan. 26.
Moses added that when she was convicted in 2015, no one informed her that she had lost her right to vote.
The Daily Mail notes further:
The University of Tennessee graduate, who received a degree in political science from the school, found out she was still on probation in 2019 and after trying to run for mayor. After a judge confirmed it, she visited a probations officer to make sure [that] her probation was correct. The officer then provided the activist with a certification of completion, which she turned in to receive her right to vote.
The mother-of-two told the Guardian last year: ‘They never mentioned anything about voting. They never mentioned anything about not voting, being able to vote…none of that.’
At the time, Tennessee authorities should have taken her off the rolls, but Memphis officials never received the paperwork, the Guardian reported.
Moses further claimed that she became aware of the probation issue when she filed to run for Memphis mayor in 2019 and was informed that she couldn’t because of her felonies. But at that time, officials realized as well that she had not been taken off registered voter lists.
Moses, who is an activist and a musician, went back to court to see if she was still on probation. After that, she went to the probation office to have officials confirm her sentence, “as she believed it was too long, and an officer signed a certificate saying her probation had ended,” the Daily Mail reported.
A few days later, however, according to The Guardian, a corrections officer contacted an elections official by email and said that Moses’ probationary period was still in effect and as such, she was still ineligible to vote.
During her trial last month, prosecutors argued that Moses still knew she was on probation when she submitted the certificate, as a judge had recently informed her at the time she was ineligible.
“Even knowing that order denied her expiration of sentence, Pamela Moses submitted that form with her application for voter registration and signed an oath as to the accuracy of the information submitted,” prosecutors noted. “Pamela Moses knowingly made or consented to a false entry on her permanent registration.”
In the end, Moses was sentenced to six years and one day behind bars, though her attorney plans to appeal.
“This case is one about the disparity in sentencing and punishment — and one that shouldn’t have happened,” attorney Bede Anyanwu told the Washington Post. “It’s all very, very disturbing.”
According to The Grio, a black-centric publication, Moses was merely convicted of “registering to vote.”
Her sentence is also being appealed by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which argued that the U.S. has “two sentencing systems.”
