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.
Pamela Moses, a 45-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.
This article was amended on 26 October 2022. Pamela Moses is 45 years old, not 44 as an earlier version stated.
