Who is Pamela Moses? BLM leader faces 6-year sentence for illegally registering to vote
Critics have slammed a Tennessee judge after she slapped Pamela Moses with a six-year sentence for illegally voting. According to reports, Moses registered to vote in 2019, despite not completing her probation from a 2015 felony conviction. However, Moses laid the blame with the election commission, and dubbed her case "voter suppression", in what has quickly grown to become an extremely controversial case.
The challenge Moses faces is similar to that faced by Hervis Rogers, a Houston man who was charged for voting while still on parole. In August, a California man was arrested for voting three times as his late mother. The cases have led credence to Donald Trump's claims that the 2020 Presidental Election was stolen, despite being too few are rare to have caused a change in the result.
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In her defense, Moses says she received a letter from the probation department signaling she was eligible to vote, a claim that the judge appears to have ignored. She was convicted in November 2021 and sentenced on February 3, 2022.
Who is Pamela Moses?
The 44-year-old activist is perhaps best known for founding the Memphis chapter of the Black Lives Matter movement. However, before that, she had a long criminal history of 16 felony convictions going back decades. Of those, the most serious was the one for which she was serving probation when she attempted to register to vote. Between February and March 2014, Moses stalked and harassed a Shelby County judge in order to file a complaint against the judge.
That led to a 10-count indictment, to which Moses pleaded guilty in 2015. She was handed an eight-year suspended sentence, with time served on probation. Other convictions include a 2013 tag-switching and theft case, and an attempt to escape from custody in December 2014 after failing to post bond. Despite the record, in 2019 she launched a long-shot bid to become Memphis' Mayor, which is when she attempted to register to vote, leading to her six-year jail sentence.
She is also a mother of two, and a graduate of The University of Tennessee. It's unclear where Moses works, or what her role was in the BLM movement recently. All attention is now focused on her case, which many have called an example of America's racial divide in the criminal justice system.
Moses sentence slammed
In 2019, Moses attempted to register to run for Memphis' Mayor, when she was informed she could not because of her felony record. When election officials began digging into her, they found she was never struck off the electoral rolls after her 2015 conviction. Under Tennessee law, Moses is ineligible to vote until the completion of her probation. She then went to court to clarify whether or not she was still on probation.
When a judge said she was, Moses went to her probation officer and asked him to double-check. She claims the officer signed a certificate signaling her probation was complete, which she took to election officials along with a voter registration form. The next day, the department of corrections (DoC) emailed the election commission to say that the certificate was given "in error", and Moses was still serving probation. While no justification was provided for the error, it turned Moses' life upside down.
She was charged with falsifying information on her voter registration and convicted despite the DoC acknowledging it made an error. "I relied on the election commission because those are the people who are supposed to know what you’re supposed to do," she told WREG Memphis in December 2021. She went on to claim, "They want to pick and control who the Black leaders are in the South. And they do it through voter suppression."
During sentencing, the judge said, "You tricked the probation department into giving you documents saying you were off probation." She is expected to appeal her draconian sentence, which many activists have slammed. Janai Nelson of the NCAAP told MSNBC, "It’s a confluence of racial discrimination and voter suppression."