{"id":29326,"date":"2022-03-03T10:02:21","date_gmt":"2022-03-03T10:02:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/?p=29326"},"modified":"2022-03-03T10:02:21","modified_gmt":"2022-03-03T10:02:21","slug":"a-white-man-got-probation-for-voting-fraud-a-black-woman-faced-six-years-in-prison-for-an-error-us-voting-rights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/2022\/03\/03\/a-white-man-got-probation-for-voting-fraud-a-black-woman-faced-six-years-in-prison-for-an-error-us-voting-rights\/","title":{"rendered":"A white man got probation for voting fraud. A Black woman faced six years in prison for an error | US voting rights"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In the late summer of 2020, Bruce Bartman went to Pennsylvania\u2019s voter registration website and signed up his mother and mother-in-law to vote. Both women were dead.<\/p>\n

A few months later, Bartman, who is white, requested a mail-in ballot for his late mother and cast her vote for Donald Trump. Bartman was arrested<\/a> that December and charged with perjury and unlawful voting. Months later, he pleaded guilty, admitted he made a \u201cstupid mistake,\u201d was sentenced to five years of probation and barred from serving on a jury or voting for four years. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s not public benefit to him being incarcerated,\u201d Jack Stollsteimer, the local district attorney said at the time<\/a>. \u201cThis defendant from the beginning has accepted responsibility for his actions, and he has paid the price for them.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Bartman pleaded guilty, nearly 1,000 miles away, in Memphis, a Black Lives Matter activist named Pamela Moses<\/a> was facing her own election-related criminal charges. A few years previously, Moses, who is Black, permanently lost the right to vote after committing a felony. But no one had actually removed Moses from the voter rolls or told her she couldn\u2019t vote. And in 2019, when state officials began looking into her eligibility, a probation officer signed a certificate saying Moses had completed her sentence and was eligible to vote. So she applied to do so. Even though corrections officials conceded they made an error, Moses was indicted anyway.<\/p>\n

Moses was convicted by a jury in November. In late January, she was sentenced to six years and one day in prison<\/p>\n

Her sentence attracted widespread national scrutiny for its harshness \u2013 it is among the most severe for an election-related crime issued in recent memory. Following weeks of outcry and the introduction of new evidence<\/a> revealed by the Guardian, a judge ordered a new trial<\/a> for Moses last week.<\/p>\n

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\"Pamela<\/picture><\/div>
<\/svg><\/span>\u201cIt is voter suppression. It is a message to consider whether you should vote or not,\u201d a criminal justice advocate said of the message sent by the harsh sentence handed down to Pamela Moses, right.<\/span> Photograph: Jim Weber\/AP<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Despite that unusual reversal, the case also underscored what many experts see as a double standard in the US criminal justice system: white people face relatively light punishment for intentional cases of fraud, while Black people face tougher punishments for unintentional voting errors.<\/p>\n

No comprehensive data exists comparing voter fraud prosecutions based on race. It\u2019s also difficult to compare prosecutions in different jurisdictions because a criminal sentence depends on many factors, including the discretion of the local prosecutor, state laws, the facts of the offense, and the defendant\u2019s criminal history. But the experts say the cases that have come to prominence ring alarm bells.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis [Moses] conviction has resonated across the country, the world, and it certainly has resonated in this community. I would suggest that it certainly resonated with Black women who might wonder if they\u2019re eligible to vote in the coming elections,\u201d said Josh Spickler, the executive director of Just City, a criminal justice non-profit in Memphis. \u201cIt is what you think it is. It is voter suppression. It is a message to consider whether you should vote or not.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moses\u2019 case immediately attracted comparisons to the case of Crystal Mason<\/a>, a Texas woman who was sentenced to five years in prison for voting while on federal supervised release \u2013 similar to probation \u2013 in 2016. Probation officials testified that they never told Mason she couldn\u2019t vote, and her ballot was never counted, but a judge found her guilty of illegally voting anyway. An appeal is currently pending at Texas\u2019 highest criminal court.<\/p>\n

Last summer, Texas officials also arrested Hervis Rogers<\/a>, who is Black, for voting while on probation for a felony. Rogers, who received national attention after waiting seven hours in line to vote in 2020, also says didn\u2019t know he was ineligible. His case is currently pending and he could face years in prison.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we do see is that there\u2019s a willingness to go after people who are making, at worst, innocent mistakes. That\u2019s not what our justice system should be about,\u201d said Thomas Buser-Clancy, a lawyer with the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union who is helping represent both Mason and Rogers.<\/p>\n

These relatively long sentences stand out even more given several recent examples in which white defendants who committed acts of fraud received no prison time at all.<\/p>\n

Last year, a 72-year old Republican voter in Pennsylvania was sentenced to probation after putting on sunglasses<\/a> and trying to impersonate his son at the polls. In Arizona, a 64-year-old woman pleaded guilty to forging her deceased mother\u2019s signature on a mail-in ballot; she was sentenced to probation and could face up to 90 days in jail <\/a>when she\u2019s sentenced in March. In Nevada, a Republican who voted using his dead wife\u2019s ballot<\/a> and then lied about it pleaded guilty and was sentenced to probation.<\/p>\n

And in 2018, about a month after Mason was sentenced, a white justice of the peace in the same county pleaded guilty to forging signatures to get on the ballot when he was running for office. He was sentenced to probation.<\/p>\n

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\"Crystal<\/picture><\/div>
<\/svg><\/span>Crystal Mason is facing five years in Texas prisons because she mistakenly cast a provisional ballot.<\/span> Photograph: Ed Pilkington\/The Guardian<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cYou have Ms. Mason\u2019s case of what at worst is an innocent mistake\u2026on the other hand you have someone who intentionally – you can\u2019t innocently forge signatures, and they received probation,\u201d said Buser-Clancy. \u201cIt\u2019s the same county, same DA, very different results, when you would expect it to go the opposite way.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Texas, the prosecutor who handled Mason\u2019s case defended the harsh sentence by noting that she offered her a plea deal with probation. \u201cOur office offered Mason the option of probation in this case, which she refused. She chose to have a trial by judge, and the judge found beyond a reasonable doubt from the evidence that she knew she wasn\u2019t eligible to vote and voted anyway,\u201d she said in 2019<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Amy Weirich, the district attorney in Memphis who prosecuted Moses, also defended her handling of the case in part by noting that she offered Moses a plea deal that didn\u2019t involve incarceration.<\/p>\n

\u201cI gave her a chance to plead to a misdemeanor with no prison time,\u201d Weirich said in a statement. \u201cShe requested a jury trial instead. She set this unfortunate result in motion and a jury of her peers heard the evidence and convicted her.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a fact for various reasons that people who go to trial generally get harsher sentences,\u201d said Daniel Richman, a law professor at Columbia University who has written extensively about prosecutors. \u201cSometimes you hear arguments, and there\u2019s some substance to them, that the prosecution is seeking to punish the defendant for going to trial, and I\u2019m sure that happens. But another thing that always happens is the judge knows the case a lot better. And generally, when a judge knows a case a lot better, the defendant is worse off.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the decision to reject a plea and go to trial, a constitutional right in the US, shouldn\u2019t necessarily lead to a harsher sentence, experts say. For someone who already has a criminal record like Mason or Moses, accepting a plea deal for a new crime can have severe consequences, such as the revocation of probation or losing a job.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy is it we have a system where a prosecutor can basically say to somebody, you plead, we\u2019ll extend your probation. If you don\u2019t plead, you\u2019re facing six years. Does that sound like the kind of system we want?,\u201d said Bennett Capers, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches law at Fordham University. \u201cIf [Moses] had taken the plea, nobody would have known about this case.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prosecutors have also defended the sentences for Moses and Mason by pointing to their prior criminal records. But in the US, having a criminal conviction means navigating an enormously confusing set of rules in order to regain one\u2019s vote, and such rules vary widely by state. Those confusing voting rules are more likely to affect Black Americans like Moses and Mason.<\/p>\n

Over one-fifth of Black people of voting age in Moses\u2019 home state of Tennessee \u2013 nearly 175,000 people \u2013 can\u2019t vote because of a felony conviction, according to an estimate<\/a> by The Sentencing Project, a criminal justice non-profit. There is a stark racial disparity. Around 17% of Tennessee\u2019s population is Black, but Black people account for around 40% of those disenfranchised because of a felony conviction in the state. Nationally, around 2.3% of the voting age population can\u2019t vote because of a felony conviction. But it is 6.3% of Black Americans of voting age.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is much more likely to have a disparate effect on people who are Black and brown. People who are Black and Brown are more likely to have a conviction,\u201d Capers said.<\/p>\n

The Moses case \u201csort of sends a message that \u2018you know, by the way, don\u2019t think about going to the polls\u2019\u201d, Capers said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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