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    Pamela Moses sues officials after voter fraud conviction overturned

    Pamela Moses sues officials after voter fraud conviction overturnedTennessee woman was serving six-year sentence before prosecutors’ withholding of crucial document came to light A Tennessee woman who had a six-year prison sentence for voter fraud overturned this year is suing state and local officials for damages, claiming she was wrongfully prosecuted and incarcerated.Judge dismisses fraud case against Texas man who waited seven hours to voteRead morePamela Moses, a 44-year-old Memphis activist, was sentenced to six years in prison in January after prosecutors said she tried to register to vote knowing she was ineligible because of a prior felony conviction. She was convicted even though two government officials, including a probation officer who conceded he made an error, signed off on a state form affirming her eligibility. The case prompted national outrage .Moses’s conviction was overturned by a judge in February after the Guardian published documents underscoring the probation department’s error. Prosecutors did not turn over the document, an internal email from Tennessee’s department of correction blaming the probation officer for the error, to Moses’s defense before her trial.Moses spent 82 days in jail before her conviction was overturned. The prosecution caused her “mental anguish, emotional distress, stress, anxiety, embarrassment, humiliation and demoralization”, her lawyers wrote in a complaint filed in federal court last week.In 2015, Moses pleaded guilty to several felonies, causing her to lose her right to vote. But no one told her she was ineligible to vote and election officials never removed her from the rolls. It wasn’t until 2019, when Moses got into a dispute with election officials about her eligibility to run for mayor, that authorities noticed their error.Moses, believing she had completed probation, tried to register to vote. The local clerk and probation office signed off on her eligibility, even though Moses was still on probation for her felony. In Tennessee, a conviction for tampering with evidence – which is one of the offenses Moses pleaded guilty to in 2015 – permanently strips offenders of their right to vote.Moses accused Amy Weirich, the district attorney who handled the case, of knowingly withholding evidence that could have exonerated her. Weirich said earlier this year that the department of correction had not provided the document to her office. A spokesperson for the department said in February there was a “lack of recognition of the scope” of the documents that had been requested.Moses’s case is one of several instances recently in which prosecutors have levied voter fraud charges against people with felony convictions only to see the cases be dismissed months later. In Florida, a Miami man who was among 19 charged with voting fraud in a suite of cases heralded by Ron DeSantis had his case dismissed on Friday. In Texas, a judge also dismissed charges last week against Hervis Rogers, a Houston man who waited hours in line to vote and was charged with voter fraud because of a prior criminal conviction. Moses is the first defendant to sue prosecutors after her case was dismissed.She likely faces an uphill battle in court.“Suits about failure to disclose exculpatory evidence do face a high burden, as the supreme court underscored in the recent case of Connick v Thompson,” said Jeffrey Welty, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s school of government. He said he had not followed Moses’s case closely enough to opine on its merits, but in general, he said, “the court said that a plaintiff can’t just show a single incident of non-disclosure but must show a policy of deliberate indifference to defendants’ rights.“It looks like another part of the suit might allege malicious prosecution,” he added. “That requires a plaintiff to show that they were prosecuted without probable cause and with malice, which requires that the prosecution be brought in bad faith or for an improper purpose. The requirement of malice can be difficult to establish since the normal assumption is that when prosecutors charge people with crimes, they’re just doing their jobs.”Weirich, a Republican, lost her re-election bid last month to Steve Mulroy, a Democrat who brought up Moses’s case frequently on the campaign trail.The district attorney’s office did not immediately return a request for comment.Tennessee has some of the most restrictive laws in the US when it comes to restoring voting rights for people with felonies. About 471,592 people in the state, and more than 21% of its Black voting age population, cannot vote because of a felony, according to an estimate by the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice non-profit.TopicsTennesseeThe fight to voteUS politicsUS crimenewsReuse this content More

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    ‘It’s good to think strategically’: Thomas E Ricks on civil rights and January 6

    Interview‘It’s good to think strategically’: Thomas E Ricks on civil rights and January 6Martin Pengelly in Washington In his new book, the historian considers the work of Martin Luther King and others through the lens of military thoughtThere is a direct connection from Freedom Summer to the January 6 committee,” says Thomas E Ricks as he discusses his new book, Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968.‘Now is a continuation of then’: America’s civil rights era – in picturesRead moreFreedom Summer was a 1964 campaign to draw attention to violence faced by Black people in Mississippi when they tried to vote. The House January 6 committee will soon conclude its hearings on the Capitol riot of 2021, when supporters of Donald Trump attacked American democracy itself.But the committee is chaired by Bennie Thompson. In his opening statement, in June, the Democrat said: “I was born, raised, and still live in Bolton, Mississippi … I’m from a part of the country where people justify the actions of slavery, Ku Klux Klan and lynching. I’m reminded of that dark history as I hear voices today try and justify the actions of the insurrectionists of 6 January 2021.”Ricks is reminded of the insurrectionists as he retells that grim history. Watching the January 6 hearings, he says, he “was looking at Bennie Thompson. And I realised, his career follows right on.“Summer ’64, you start getting Black people registered in Mississippi. A tiny minority, about 7%, are able to vote in ’64 but it rises to I think 59% by ’68. Bennie Thompson gets elected alderman [of Bolton, in 1969], mayor [1973] and eventually to Congress [1993]. And then as a senior member of Congress, chairs this January 6 committee.“Well, there is a direct connection from Freedom Summer, and [civil rights leaders] Amzie Moore, Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer and Dave Dennis, to the January 6 committee. And I think that’s a wonderful thing.”Under Thompson, Ricks says, the January 6 committee is acting strategically, “establishing an indisputable factual record of what happened”, a bulwark against attempts to rewrite history.“It’s always good to think strategically,” Ricks says. Which brings him back to his book.As a reporter for the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, Ricks was twice part of teams that won a Pulitzer prize. His bestselling books include Fiasco (2006) and The Gamble (2009), lacerating accounts of the Iraq disaster, and The Generals (2012), on the decline of US military leadership. In Waging a Good War, he applies the precepts of military strategy to the civil rights campaigns.He says: “This book, I wrote because I had to. I had to get it out of my head. The inspiration was I married a woman who had been active in civil rights.”Mary Kay Ricks is the author of Escape on the Pearl (2008), about slavery and the Underground Railroad. In the 1960s, she was “president of High School Friends of the SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee], Washington DC chapter.“She would pick people up at Union Station and drive them wherever they needed to be. So her memory of [the late Georgia congressman] John Lewis is him arriving, saying, ‘I’m hungry, take me to McDonald’s.’ All our lives we would be driving along, and somebody would be on the radio, and she’d say, ‘Oh, I knew that guy’ or ‘I dated that guy. Oh, I thought he was crazy.’“So I was reading about the civil rights movement to understand my wife and the stories she told me. And the more I read, the more it struck me: ‘Wow. This is an area that can really be illuminated by military thinking.’ That a lot of what they were doing was what in military operations is called logistics, or a classic defensive operation, or a holding action, or a raid behind enemy lines. And the more I looked at it, the more I thought each of the major civil rights campaigns could be depicted in that light.”In 1961, campaigners launched the Freedom Rides, activists riding buses across the south, seeking to draw attention and thereby end illegal segregation onboard and in stations. It was dangerous work, daring and remote. Ricks compares the Freedom Rides to cavalry raids, most strikingly to civil war operations by the Confederate “Gray Ghost”, John Singleton Mosby.“The Freedom Rides as raids behind enemy lines. What does that mean? Well, it struck me again and again how military-like the civil rights movement was in careful preparation. What is the task at hand? How do we prepare? What sort of people do we need to carry out this mission? What kind of training do they need?“Before the Freedom Rides they sent a young man, Tom Gaither, on a reconnaissance trip, where he drew maps of each bus station so they would know where the segregated waiting rooms were. He reported back: ‘The two cities where you’re going to have trouble are Anniston, Alabama, and Montgomery, Alabama.’ There are real race tensions in those cities.”Activists faced horrendous violence. They met it with non-violence.“They did months of training. First of all, how to capture and prevent the impulse to fight or flee. Somebody slugs you, spits on you, puts out a cigarette on your back. They knew how to react: non-violent.“But this is a really militant form of non-violence. Gandhi denounced the term passive resistance. And these people, many of them followers of God, devoted readers of Gandhi, understood this was very confrontational.”In 1965, Selma, Alabama, was the scene of Bloody Sunday, when white authorities attacked a march on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and southern racism stood exposed.Ricks says: “A line I love comes from Selma. People said, ‘What are we doing when the sheriff comes after us?’ The organisers said, ‘No, you’re going after the sheriff.’ A good example: CT Vivian, one of my heroes, a stalwart of civil rights, is thrown down the steps of the county courthouse at Selma by Jim Clark, the county sheriff. And Vivian looks up and yells, ‘Who are you people? What do you tell your wives and children?’“It is such a human question. And in this confrontational form of non-violence, I think they flummoxed the existing system, of white supremacism, which the world saw was a system built on violence inherited from slavery.”Bloody Sunday remembered: civil rights marchers tell story of their iconic photosRead moreRicks has written about his time in Iraq and post-traumatic stress disorder. At the end of Waging a Good War, he considers how those who campaigned for civil rights, who were beaten, shot and imprisoned, struggled to cope with the toll.“If you want to understand the full cost, it’s important to write about the effect on the activists and their families, their children. Dave Dennis Jr, the son of one of the people who ran Freedom Summer, he and I have talked about this a bit. We believe the Veterans Administration should be open to veterans of the civil rights movement. There aren’t a lot of veterans still alive. Nonetheless, it would be a meaningful gesture that could help some people who have had a hard time in life.”In a passage that could fuel a whole book, Ricks considers how Martin Luther King Jr, the greatest civil rights leader, struggled in the years before his assassination, in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968.Like many PTSD sufferers, King sought refuge in drink and sex. But for Ricks, “the moment that captures it for me is he’s sitting in a rocking chair in Atlanta, with his friend Dorothy Cotton. And he says, ‘I think I should take a sabbatical.’ This is about 1967. This guy had been under daily threat for 13 years. I compare him to [Dwight] Eisenhower and the pressures he was under as a top commander in world war two … yet King does this for well over a decade. The stress was enormous. I only wish he had been able to take that sabbatical.”The campaign took its toll on others, among them James Bevel, a “tactically innovative, strategically brilliant” activist who abused women and children, moved far right and died in disgrace.Ricks hopes his book might help make other activists better known, among them Pauli Murray, Diane Nash – a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom – and Fred Shuttlesworth, “a powerful character, a moonshiner turned minister”.Shuttlesworth lived in Birmingham, Alabama, scene of some of the worst attacks on the civil rights movement, most of all the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963, in which four young girls were killed.To Ricks, “If there’s a real moment of despair in Martin Luther King’s life, it’s the Birmingham church bombing. He says, ‘At times, life is hard, as hard as crucible steel.’ That was the focal point for how I think about what King went through.”But there is light in Birmingham too. Ricks recounts the time “the white establishment calls Fred Shuttlesworth up and says, ‘We hear Martin Luther King might be coming to town. What can we do to stop that?’ And he leans back and smiles and says, ‘You know, I’ve been bombed twice in this town. Nobody called me then. But now you want to talk?’“Shuttlesworth threw himself into things. He believed in non-violence as an occasional tactic, not as a way of life. He sent a carloads of guys carrying shotguns to rescue the Freedom Riders from the KKK in Anniston.“Then there’s Amzie Moore. I wish I could have written more about him. He came home from world war two, worked at a federal post office so he would not be under control of local government. He starts his own gas station and refuses to have whites-only bathrooms. ‘Nope, not gonna do it.’ To me, he’s like a member of the French Resistance but he does it for 20 years. When Bob Moses and other civil rights workers go to Mississippi, he’s the guy they look up. ‘How do I survive in Mississippi?’ And he tells them and helps them.”Waging a Good War also considers how campaigners today might learn from those who went before. Ricks says: “Some of the people in the Black Lives Matter era have reached back. I talked to one person who went to James Lawson, the trainer of the Nashville sit-ins in 1960, and asked, ‘How do you go about this? How do you think about this? What about losses? Instructions?’“A demonstration is only the end product, the tip of an iceberg. There has to be careful preparation, consideration of, ‘What message are we trying to send? How are we going to send it? How are we going to follow up?’ So James Lawson conveys that message. Similarly, Bob Moses, who recently died, attended a Black Lives Matter meeting. There are roots by which today’s movements reach back down to the movements of the forefathers.”Democrats see hope in Stacey Abrams (again) in a crucial US election – if she can get voters to show upRead moreHe also sees echoes in two major strands of activism today.“Stacey Abrams’ work on voting rights is very similar to a lot of the work Martin Luther King did with the SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference]. Fighting voter suppression, finding ways to encourage minorities to register and to vote, looking to expand the franchise.“Black Lives Matter reminds me of SNCC, if somewhat more radical, more focused not on gaining power through the vote but on abuses of power, especially police brutality.“It’s sad that the problems the movement tried to address in the 1950s and 60s still need to be addressed. We have moments of despair. Nonetheless, one of things about writing the book was to show people who went through difficult times, and usually found ways to succeed.“The more I learned, the more I enjoyed it. It was a real contrast. Writing about the Iraq war? It’s hard. This felt good. I was hauled to my writing desk every morning. I loved writing this book.”
    Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
    TopicsBooksCivil rights movementUS politicsRaceThe far rightProtestBlack Lives Matter movementinterviewsReuse this content More

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    Slew of trigger laws kick in as three more US states ban abortions

    Slew of trigger laws kick in as three more US states ban abortionsTennessee, Texas and Idaho join eight other states as millions of women will lose access to abortion and in certain cases doctors will be punished for performing procedure A slew of trigger bans across three US states kicked in on Thursday as Tennessee, Texas and Idaho join eight other states that have formally outlawed abortion since the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in June.Depending on the state, trigger laws are designed to take effect either immediately following the overturn of Roe or 30 days after the supreme court’s transmission of its judgment, which took place on 26 July.Currently, nearly one in three women between the ages of 15 to 44 live in states where abortion has been banned or mostly banned. According to data obtained by the US census, that is nearly 21 million women affected.“More people will lose abortion access across the nation as bans take effect in Texas, Tennessee and Idaho. Vast swaths of the nation, especially in the south and midwest, will become abortion deserts that, for many, will be impossible to escape,” Nancy Northup, CEO of the Center of Reproductive Rights, said in a statement.“Evidence is already mounting of women being turned away despite needing urgent, and in some cases life-saving, medical care. This unfolding public health crisis will only continue to get worse. We will see more and more of these harrowing situations, and once state legislatures reconvene in January, we will see even more states implement abortion bans and novel laws criminalizing abortion providers, pregnant people, and those who help them,” she added.Thursday’s trigger bans strip away the right to abortion access for millions of women in Tennessee, Texas and Idaho and in certain cases punish doctors and healthcare providers for performing the procedure.In Tennessee, the state’s previous abortion law that bans the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy has been replaced with a stricter law. Aside from the exception of preventing the mother’s death or permanent bodily injury, the law bans abortion completely. It does not make any exceptions for victims of incest or rape.The law, called the Human Life Protection Act, makes it a felony for those who are caught performing or attempting to perform an abortion. Consequences include fines, prison time and the loss of voting rights.According to the law, abortions are prohibited from being performed based on mental health claims, including claims that the woman may “engage in conduct that would result in her death or substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function”.Texas, which already passed one of the nation’s strictest abortion laws last yearbanning the procedure beyond six weeks of pregnancy and offering no exceptions for incest or rape, will see a new trigger law take effect that makes the provision of abortion a first-degree felony. Consequences include life sentences and a civil penalty of $100,000 for each violation.“The criminal penalties will further chill the provision of care to women who need it,” Elisabeth Smith, director of state policy and advocacy for the Center of Productive Rights, told the Washington Post.Texas’s trigger ban comes a day after a federal judge in the state blocked an order from the Biden administration issued in the wake of the supreme court’s overruling of Roe that required hospitals to provide emergency abortions.According to Judge James Hendrix, a Donald Trump-appointee, the US Department of Health and Human Services overreached in its guidance interpreting the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labour Act. The 1986 law, also known as Emtala, requires people to receive emergency medical care regardless of their ability to pay for the services.“That guidance goes well beyond EMTALA’s text, which protects both mothers and unborn children, is silent as to abortion, and preempts state law only when the two directly conflict,” Hendrix wrote in a 67-page ruling.The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, condemned the decision, calling it a “a blow to Texans”, and adding, “It’s wrong, it’s backwards, and women may die as a result. The fight is not over.”Abortions in Idaho were previously limited to a six-week period into pregnancy. However, Thursday’s trigger law completely prohibits abortion with the exceptions of reported cases of rape and incest and to prevent the death of the mother – but not necessarily to safeguard her health.The ban makes performing an abortion in any “clinically diagnosable pregnancy” a felony that is punishable by up to five years of jail time.Despite the sweeping ban, an Idaho judge barred the state at the 11th hour from enforcing its abortion ban in medical emergencies, making the ruling the exact opposite of Hendrix’s decision in Texas. The ruling from federal judge Lynn Winmill on Wednesday evening says that the state cannot prosecute anyone who performs an abortion in an emergency medical situation.“At its core, the supremacy clause says state law must yield to federal law when it’s impossible to comply with both. And that’s all this case is about,” Winmill wrote. “It’s not about the bygone constitutional right to an abortion,” he added.With such conflicting rulings, both cases could be appealed and the supreme court may be asked to intervene.TopicsRoe v WadeUS supreme courtAbortionRepublicansUS politicsTennesseeTexasnewsReuse this content More

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    Memphis prosecutor who charged Black woman over voting error loses re-election bid

    Memphis prosecutor who charged Black woman over voting error loses re-election bidAmy Weirich stirred outrage for bringing criminal charges against Pamela Moses, whose conviction was subsequently overturned Amy Weirich, the Memphis prosecutor who stirred national outrage for bringing criminal charges against a Black woman for trying to register to vote, has lost her re-election bid.Republican candidates who deny 2020 election results win key primariesRead moreWeirich, a Republican who has been the district attorney general in Shelby county since 2011, lost to Democrat Steve Mulroy, a law professor at the University of Memphis and a former county commissioner.Weirich’s defeat marks a major victory for criminal justice reform advocates, who had pressured her office over its use of cash bail, diversity and decisions to try juveniles as adults.Earlier this year, Weirich trumpeted a criminal conviction and six-year prison sentence for Pamela Moses, who tried to restore her right to vote after a 2015 felony conviction. Tennessee’s rules for restoring voting rights are extremely confusing, and Weirich’s office brought charges against Moses even though a probation officer had signed off on a form saying she was eligible. Prosecutors argued she had deceived the officer into signing off on the form.But after the trial, the Guardian published a document showing that the Tennessee department of corrections had investigated the error and made no mention of deception. Instead, the department blamed the officer. Weirich’s office failed to turn over the document to Moses’ defense team before trial, leading a judge to take the extremely rare step of overturning her conviction and ordering a new trial. Weirich said her office was not to blame for the mistake because the department of corrections failed to give her office the document.It was not the first time Weirich had come under fire for failing to disclose evidence to a defendant – a 2017 study found her office had more instances of misconduct than any prosecutor in the state from 2010 to 2015. In 2017, she also accepted a private reprimand from the Tennessee board of professional responsibility for casting aspersions on a defendant’s decision not to testify during a murder trial.TopicsMemphisThe fight to voteUS politicsTennesseenewsReuse this content More

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    Tennessee Eighth Congressional District Primary Election Results 2022

    Source: Election results and race calls from The Associated Press. The Times estimates the number of remaining votes based on historic turnout data and reporting from The Associated Press. These are only estimates and they may not be informed by official reports from election officials.The New York Times’s results team is a group of graphics editors, engineers and reporters who build and maintain software to publish election results in real-time as they are reported by results providers. To learn more about how election results work, read this article.The Times’s election results pages are produced by Michael Andre, Aliza Aufrichtig, Neil Berg, Matthew Bloch, Véronique Brossier, Sean Catangui, Andrew Chavez, Nate Cohn, Alastair Coote, Annie Daniel, Asmaa Elkeurti, Tiffany Fehr, Andrew Fischer, Will Houp, Josh Katz, Aaron Krolik, Jasmine C. Lee, Vivian Li, Rebecca Lieberman, Ilana Marcus, Jaymin Patel, Rachel Shorey, Charlie Smart, Umi Syam, Urvashi Uberoy, Isaac White and Christine Zhang. Reporting by Maya King; production by Amanda Cordero and Jessica White; editing by Wilson Andrews, Kenan Davis, Amy Hughes and Ben Koski. More

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    Tennessee Sixth Congressional District Primary Election Results 2022

    Source: Election results and race calls from The Associated Press. The Times estimates the number of remaining votes based on historic turnout data and reporting from The Associated Press. These are only estimates and they may not be informed by official reports from election officials.The New York Times’s results team is a group of graphics editors, engineers and reporters who build and maintain software to publish election results in real-time as they are reported by results providers. To learn more about how election results work, read this article.The Times’s election results pages are produced by Michael Andre, Aliza Aufrichtig, Neil Berg, Matthew Bloch, Véronique Brossier, Sean Catangui, Andrew Chavez, Nate Cohn, Alastair Coote, Annie Daniel, Asmaa Elkeurti, Tiffany Fehr, Andrew Fischer, Will Houp, Josh Katz, Aaron Krolik, Jasmine C. Lee, Vivian Li, Rebecca Lieberman, Ilana Marcus, Jaymin Patel, Rachel Shorey, Charlie Smart, Umi Syam, Urvashi Uberoy, Isaac White and Christine Zhang. Reporting by Maya King; production by Amanda Cordero and Jessica White; editing by Wilson Andrews, Kenan Davis, Amy Hughes and Ben Koski. More

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    Tennessee Ninth Congressional District Primary Election Results 2022

    Source: Election results and race calls from The Associated Press. The Times estimates the number of remaining votes based on historic turnout data and reporting from The Associated Press. These are only estimates and they may not be informed by official reports from election officials.The New York Times’s results team is a group of graphics editors, engineers and reporters who build and maintain software to publish election results in real-time as they are reported by results providers. To learn more about how election results work, read this article.The Times’s election results pages are produced by Michael Andre, Aliza Aufrichtig, Neil Berg, Matthew Bloch, Véronique Brossier, Sean Catangui, Andrew Chavez, Nate Cohn, Alastair Coote, Annie Daniel, Asmaa Elkeurti, Tiffany Fehr, Andrew Fischer, Will Houp, Josh Katz, Aaron Krolik, Jasmine C. Lee, Vivian Li, Rebecca Lieberman, Ilana Marcus, Jaymin Patel, Rachel Shorey, Charlie Smart, Umi Syam, Urvashi Uberoy, Isaac White and Christine Zhang. Reporting by Maya King; production by Amanda Cordero and Jessica White; editing by Wilson Andrews, Kenan Davis, Amy Hughes and Ben Koski. More