Tennessee DA Faces Voters, Months After Prosecuting Activist for Wanting to Vote

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Taniel
@Taniel
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I've been wanting to write this one for a while: the DA who prosecuted Pamela Moses, the Black woman who registered to vote erroneously & ended up with a 6-year sentence, is up for re-election on Thursday.

And that case speaks to so much that's alarming.

boltsmag.org
Tennessee DA Faces Voters, Months After Prosecuting Activist for Wanting to Vote - Bolts
The charges against Pamela Moses, a Black woman initially sentenced to six years in prison for registering to vote, offered a window into the inequities of the criminal legal system in Shelby County.
9:45 AM · Aug 2, 2022

https://boltsmag.org/tennessee-shelby-county-da-election/

Pamela Moses wanted to register to vote and run for office in Memphis, but she had been stripped of those rights. As a Black Tennessean, she was far from alone. One in five Black adults in the state are barred from voting due to a felony conviction, the result of harsh disenfranchisement laws and a wildly unequal legal system.

Still, Moses believed she was eligible to have her rights restored. She sought guidance from the probation office and received written confirmation that she was indeed eligible. But Tennessee’s rules for restoring voting rights are so dizzyingly complicated that even state workers get it wrong. In fact, Tennessee had banned Moses from voting for life. And after Moses followed a probation officer’s bad guidance and tried to register to vote, prosecutors threw the book at her.

Shelby County DA Amy Weirich took Moses to trial for illegally registering to vote, and then trumpeted her conviction and sentence when a Memphis judge sent Moses to prison for six years in January. The case sparked an outcry after The Guardian revealed that the state had given Moses faulty guidance and had already identified its error at the time of the conviction. The judge pointed to prosecutors’ failure to disclose evidence showing that Moses had been misled to order a new trial and Weirich then announced that she would drop the charges.

“Nobody, including Pam Moses, should ever face criminal charges for attempting to restore their voting rights,” Tikeila Rucker, an organizer with the group Memphis for All, told Bolts. “How or why DA Weirich sent a community activist, advocate, and voting rights activist to jail for six years is incomprehensible.”

*snip*

[SheltieLover]

1. Ty! This 1 will not get my vote!

Ps - once again, red shithole TN is an international disgrace!

[Duppers]

2. As I began reading...

My first thought was 'this has to be Memphis/ Shelby County.' Sure 'nuff.

[Celerity]

3. flush that KKKlanette POS down the shitter

A Top Tennessee Prosecutor Prides Herself On Being Tough On Crime. It’s Soaring Anyway.

Amy Weirich touts being tough on crime, but not when it comes to police.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/amy-weirich-memphis-shelby-county_n_62a0c699e4b06594c1c34327

[Hermit-The-Prog]

4. They have a chance to vote out some of the systemic racism. Go Mulroy!

[ ... ]

Mulroy indeed practices and teaches election law—an unusual background for a DA candidate, but one that has become very relevant in the race. He is an advocate for ranked-choice voting, has helped file lawsuits to expand voting rights, for instance to facilitate mail-in voting during the pandemic, and recently wrote a book on the topic. He told Bolts that he thinks this experience is relevant to his seeking the DA’s position given how criminal law is wielded to decide whether people are allowed to vote.

“The Pamela Moses case is a perfect example of the intersection between the two,” he said. “We have a racialized criminal justice system.”

Other states also have a maze of complicated restoration rules that threaten steep criminal consequences over errors, and zealous prosecutors threaten to ensnare people who make mistakes, like Crystal Mason, a Texas woman who wrongly thought she could vote while still on probation and was targeted by a conservative local prosecutor for casting a provisional ballot that wasn’t counted. This is a strong dynamic in Tennessee due to the large numbers of people who have lost their rights. Roughly 450,000 Tennesseans were barred from voting in 2020, according to the Sentencing Project; 39 percent of them were Black, compared to an overall state population that is 17 percent Black. Many more who are eligible to vote may not know it or worry about pursuing the option because of the example Weirich set with Moses.

“It does instill fear in the citizens when harsh laws are passed that criminalize what could be innocent behavior,” Linda Harris, a Memphis attorney who ran in the Democratic primary for DA and lost to Mulroy, told Bolts.

[ ... ]

[MagickMuffin]

5. One in five Black adults in the state are barred from voting

And here is where racism plays a huge role in black Americans, charge them with a felony conviction and therefore strip away their voting rights for life.

[Wounded Bear]

6. Sad, but true...the "War on Crime" was a war on minorities...nt

[MagickMuffin]

7. All by design

Before long they'll try to outlaw anyone not white and manly from voting.


If we can win more Senate seats and more in the House, we should be able to codify voting rights for everyone.

[Wounded Bear]

8. Your keyboard to god's monitor...