Judge orders new trial for US woman sentenced to six years for trying to register to vote
Pamela Moses, who has been in prison since December but is being released on Friday, says she had no idea she was inelegible
Sam Levine
Fri 25 Feb 2022 21.43 GMT
First published on Fri 25 Feb 2022 20.40 GMT
A Memphis judge ordered a new trial for Pamela Moses, a woman who was sentenced to six years in prison for trying to register to vote.
A voting site in Memphis, Tennessee, in November 2020.
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The case attracted national attention in recent weeks, following a Guardian report, because of the severity of the sentence. Moses said she had no idea she was ineligible.
Moses has been in prison since December, when her bond was revoked. On Thursday, the Guardian revealed new evidence in the case that had not been produced at the trial. Moses was being released from custody on Friday, according to Claiborne Ferguson, her attorney.
“We are so excited that the motion for new trial was granted for Pamela Moses today and that she is able to return home to her family while she awaits trial. We hope that she receives justice and is found not guilty for the admitted mistakes of the state of Tennessee,” said Dawn Harrington, the executive director of Free Hearts, a criminal justice organization in Tennessee that supported Moses.
Moses was convicted last year for submitting a document in 2019 indicating she was eligible to vote. Prosecutors said she knew that this was false, because just months before a judge issued an order telling Moses she was still on probation for a 2015 felony. In Tennessee, people on felony probation cannot vote.
When she turned in the form, Moses believed that the probation for her 2015 felony had expired, and a probation officer even signed a certificate indicating that this was the case and that she was eligible. Prosecutors said that Moses deceived the officer into signing the certificate.
But evidence obtained by the Guardian this week showed that corrections officials investigated the error immediately afterwards and determined that the probation officer – identified as Manager Billington – was negligent and made an error while Moses waited in the lobby of his office.
“Manager Billington advised that he thought he did due diligence in making his decision,” Joe Williams, an administrator in the department of corrections, wrote in an email to Lisa Helton, a top department official. “Manager Billington failed to adequately investigate the status of this case. He failed to review all of the official documents available through the Shelby county justice portal”.
Ferguson, Moses’ attorney, said he had never seen the document before the Guardian showed it to him on Wednesday.
W Mark Ward, the judge who oversaw the case and sentenced Moses, cited the prosecution’s failure to disclose the letter, even if it was inadvertent, as one of the reasons he was ordering a new trial. “The document does contain information that was not addressed in the direct and cross-examinations of Billington and contained the identity of an additional possible witness for the defense.”
Ward also said the court had erroneously allowed information about a prior 2000 felony conviction and an earlier effort by Moses to get her voting rights back to be introduced at trial. “The only real issue for the jury during the trial was whether the defendant knew the certificate of voting rights restoration form was not accurate when she obtained it and utilized it to attempt to register to vote,” he wrote. “The fact that she was convicted of a felony in 2000 and had her right to vote restored in 2014 has no significant relevance” to the case at hand.
The ruling was an abrupt reversal for Ward, who yelled at Moses’ lawyer during the sentencing hearing and said she tricked the probation officer.
“This ruling is an extraordinary development. It is very rare for a judge to reverse himself like this, and it’s telling that he sentenced her so severely and summarily discounted her position before the case made national news,” said Josh Spickler, the executive director of Just City, a criminal justice non-profit. The district attorney’s office, he said, “has long had a reputation for failing to disclose material evidence that could benefit the accused. This is yet another shocking example of that”.
Amy Weirich, the district attorney, defended her office’s handling of evidence in the case.
“The Tennessee department of correction failed to turn over a necessary document in the case of Pamela Moses and therefore her conviction has been overturned by the judge,” Weirich said in a statement. “When reporters or political opportunists use the word ‘state’ they need to be crystal clear that the error was made by the TDOC and not any attorney or officer in the office of the Shelby county district attorney.”
Prosecutors can now decide to appeal Ward’s order, retry the case, or drop the charges. Larry Buser, a Weirich spokesman, did not immediately return a request for comment on next steps for prosecutors.