Pamela Moses ‘Requested a Jury Trial.’ So She Got 6 Years in Prison.

A Tennessee woman was sentenced last month to six years and one day in prison for illegally registering to vote while on probation. Given the nature of the offense, that punishment has been widely characterized as unnecessarily harsh by activists, advocacy groups, and the prosecutor who sought it.

One of these things is not like the other. But while Shelby County District Attorney Amy Weirich agrees that prison term isn’t proportional to the offense, she says it is justified for a different reason: the defendant, Pamela Moses, insisted on going to trial.

“I gave her a chance to plead to a misdemeanor with no prison time,” Weirich said in a statement. “She requested a jury trial instead. She set this unfortunate result in motion and a jury of her peers heard the evidence and convicted her.”

Six years of freedom is quite the steep price to pay for exercising a constitutional right.

In September 2019, Moses—who lost her right to vote after a 2015 conviction—requested that the corrections department approve a certificate to restore those rights, which would require the agency to confirm she had completed her probation. An officer did so and signed off.

Yet Moses’ voting rights could not be restored, because the officer was wrong: Her probation wouldn’t be complete until April 2022—something a judge had recently ruled on, and which the state contends Moses was well aware of prior to turning in the form.

“The narrative is that this was a voting mistake,” says Larry Buser, who does research, development, and special projects for the Shelby County District Attorney’s Office. “That’s not what happened.” Though Moses argued it was an honest error—after all, a corrections officer signed off on her form—a jury didn’t buy it. “Defense counsel argued that the negligence of the probation officer in relying on the Defendant’s statements and his incomplete search of her records somehow excused the Defendant from her fraudulent conduct,” wrote Judge W. Mark Ward in his sentencing memo. “This argument does not establish a defense under the law. It is tantamount to an argument that a person who obtains mo