Pamela Moses, the founder of the Black Lives Matter Memphis Tennessee chapter, has been sentenced to six years in prison for illegally registering to vote.

Moses had felony convictions from 2015 that made her ineligible to register to vote. Moses ignored those rules and registered anyway in 2019, and now she is set to serve a lengthy stint in prison.

Judge Mark Ward, who oversaw Moses’s trial, gave her a path out of serving her entire prison sentence. If Moses can maintain “good behavior” and complete prison programs, she will be eligible to move to probation after nine months.

“Contempt for the law”

While Judge Ward gave Moses a path to freedom, that didn’t stop him from dropping the hammer on the BLM activist.

Judge Ward said that Moses seemed “to have nothing but contempt for the law and acts as though she believes herself above the law.

“Perhaps some time in custody will serve as a period of reflection that will give the defendant the insight she needs in order to be fully rehabilitated,” he added.

Moses has previously been convicted of tampering with evidence and forgery, both felonies, and to misdemeanor charges of perjury, stalking, theft under $500, and escape. In total, she has 16 criminal convictions.

Moses was also charged with inciting a riot in 2016, but the charges were dropped after it became clear the case wouldn’t stick.

Moses’s lawyer, along with the mainstream media, has attempted to portray Moses as a victim. But Moses’s activist past and criminal record make it hard to believe that she is an unfortunate victim of bureaucracy.

Election crimes

Moses was sentenced to seven years of probation in 2015, meaning that under no circumstances should she have been eligible to register to vote in 2019.

During a hearing, Moses claimed that “I did not falsify anything. All I did was try to get my rights to vote back the way the people at the election commission told me and the way the clerk did.”

Moses’s repeated criminal offenses explain her lengthy prison sentence and call into question the potential shortening of her sentence to nine months with probation. Either way, Judge Ward has ensured that repeated violations of election laws will be punished.