Pamela Moses, a Black Lives Matter activist , was sentenced to six years in prison for trying to register to vote. Sam Levine tells the remarkable story
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In 2015 Pamela Moses was convicted of a felony crime in the US state of Tennessee. She pleaded guilty to charges of stalking, tampering with evidence, theft and perjury, although she later said she bitterly regretted accepting those charges. Her punishment was not a prison sentence but a period of probation. But it was the beginning of a chain of events that led to her being sent to jail years later for voter fraud.
The Guardian’s Sam Levine tells Nosheen Iqbal that people convicted of certain crimes in Tennessee are automatically disbarred from voting while serving out their sentence, but a bureaucratic mistake in the probation office led to Moses being given the impression that she was once again eligible to cast her ballot. When she began an unlikely run for elected office, it came to light that she was in fact not allowed to vote and she was arrested and charged with voter fraud, and later sentenced to six years in jail.
When Levine published a story about this in the Guardian, it was picked up elsewhere and became a huge national story. And one that at the time of recording still has a final act yet to play out.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
