The founder of Tennessee’s chapter of Black Lives Matter, Pamela Moses, has been sentenced to prison for illegally registering to vote while on probation, according to a report from Fox News.
The 44 year old BLM founder has been sentenced to six years in prison for registering to vote despite felony convictions in 2015 that made her ineligible to vote.
In 2015, Moses pleaded guilty to charges of tampering with evidence and forgery, both of which are felonies, and to misdemeanor charges of perjury, stalking, theft under $500, and escape. For these charges, she was placed on probation for seven years, and was also deemed ineligible to vote due to the tampering with evidence charge.
Now, Moses is trying to claim that she believed that her right to vote had been restored, despite having no evidence that the system had granted her those rights back following her felony conviction.
“You tricked the probation department into giving you documents saying you were off probation,” Criminal Court Judge W. Mark Ward said to Moses at her recent hearing.
In court, Moses claimed that she was able to vote again because the corrections department and the county election commission both signed off on her voter registration application in 2019.
But, according to reporting from the Washington Post, there was a problem: “The officials who signed off on Moses being eligible to vote acknowledged they made an error in saying her probation was over, meaning her voting rights had not been restored. So when the 44-year-old Black woman submitted the certificate as part of her voter registration, she was charged with trying to illegally register to vote.”
Responding to the conviction, Moses said: “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.”
The BLM founder will now serve six years and one day in prison, but her attorney, Bede Anyanwu, told the Washington Post that he plans to appeal her case.
“This case is one about the disparity in sentencing and punishment — and one that shouldn’t have happened,” Anyanwu said. “It’s all very, very disturbing.”
