Mayoral candidates Pamela Moses (second left) and Lemichael Wilson attend the May Day Rally outside City Hall, May 1, 2019, in Memphis, Tenn. Prosecutors will not pursue illegal voter registration allegations against Moses, a district attorney said Friday.
Jim Weber / Daily Memphian via AP, File
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Jim Weber / Daily Memphian via AP, File
Mayoral candidates Pamela Moses (second left) and Lemichael Wilson attend the May Day Rally outside City Hall, May 1, 2019, in Memphis, Tenn. Prosecutors will not pursue illegal voter registration allegations against Moses, a district attorney said Friday.
Jim Weber / Daily Memphian via AP, File
MEMPHIS.
Charges against Black Lives Matter activist Pamela Moses, 44, have been dismissed and she will no longer face a second trial “in the interest of the judicial economy”, the district attorney said. Shelby, Amy Weirich, said in a statement.
Moses, a former felon, was convicted in November of illegally registering to vote in Memphis in 2019 and sentenced on January 31 to six years and one day in prison. She has said that she did not know that she was ineligible to vote. At the time, legal experts deemed her sentence excessive.
Moses filed a request for a new trial. In February, Criminal Court Judge Mark Ward overturned her conviction and allowed Moses a second trial – which is now not going to happen.
In his statement, Moses spent 82 days in custody over the incident, “that’s enough”.
Moses declined to comment through a representative on Friday.
Moses’ previous mortal sins had permanently barred her from voting. In 2015, she committed two felonies as well as three misdemeanors and was placed on probation for seven years. Moses said she thinks her probation after pleading guilty in 2015 is over and she can start working to restore her voting rights. Moses said the Tennessee Department of Corrections issued her a certificate stating her probationary period was over, but later revoked the certificate.
Prosecutors said in February that Moses’ sentence had been overturned and a new trial was required because the Tennessee Department of Corrections failed to file “a required document” in the case.
Judge Ward said at the time that he considered the error “an unintentional failure”.
