You may have read about this or seen it somewhere. A woman was sentenced to six years in prison for trying to register to vote when she had been told that she could. She is black, and several white guys have received slaps on the wrist for actually casting fraudulent votes, so it’s a clear case of unequal justice, right? One major headline even characterized it as “Black Lives Matter activist jailed for six years for trying to register to vote after authorities told her she could.” Rachel Maddow presented the narrative, then pulled her usual trick of asking her expert guest if the story had gotten anything wrong or had focused anything improperly. The problem is that she was asking somebody she already knew to have the exact same take on the case. If she had asked me, I would have said, “Yes, Rachel, you pretty much got everything wrong. There is nothing wrong with what you said. The problem is what you left out.”
First of all, the woman had already gone before a judge, who had ruled that she was still on probation and did not have the right to vote. Unhappy with the legal ruling, she took a chance on getting a low-level civil servant to review her case and certify that her probation had expired. That worked. She then took that certification, which she knew to be legally incorrect by judicial ruling, and submitted it with her registration papers. I presume she did not tell the civil servant that a judge had already reviewed the case and ruled on it, but I don’t know that for a fact.
Second, she has a long record of similar disrespect for legal rulings. She didn’t like the ruling of a judge in 2014, so she impersonated a lawyer and a notary public and tried to file a judicial board complaint against the judge. She also threatened the judge with retaliation, and created a Facebook page to make the judge look like a racist. That last bit seems like it might be protected by the First Amendment, but there are accepted exceptions to that Amendment, so that would require a judicial ruling beyond my knowledge base. That aside, her other shenanigans led to several criminal convictions. Somehow she escaped additional jail time on those particular charges, even the act of threatening a judge. The sentence was so lenient that she was only given probation! (So much for that extra-harsh treatment of the poor woman of color.)
She also has a record of having filed civil suits which ended up with her being ordered to pay court and/or attorney’s costs because she failed to follow the court’s instructions, again demonstrating a disregard for the judicial process. (1, 2)
Third, she has a long, long history of this type of fraud and similar cons. She has 16 prior criminal convictions on her record, including tampering with or fabricating evidence, forgery, perjury and attempting to escape custody. Another of her cons was to swap tags at a department store in order to get a much lower price. The history shows that she is basically a career fraudster.
It is easy to understand the judicial pique. First of all, I’m guessing that if you are convicted of a felony while on probation, and have 16 prior criminal convictions, they are not going to be very lenient with you, while they might be with a first-time offender. Second, when a judge tells you that you are still on probation and you then go behind his or her back to get a civil servant to certify otherwise, that judge is not going to be happy with you, particularly if you have a long history of ignoring judicial instructions, or harassing and threatening other judges. It doesn’t seem to me that there is a racial component there. She happens to be a woman and she happens to be black, but she is a scofflaw, both now and in the past, and she got caught again. The case is about her behavior and her history, not about her skin tone. I’m not going to defend her six-year sentence. I don’t know the applicable laws, and how they apply to repeat offenders, or how they apply to people on probation for previous felonies, but on the surface that does sound like a ridiculously long sentence for what she did.
It may be correct that the black woman’s sentence seems too harsh while the white guys’ sentences seem too lenient, but it’s far more complicated than Maddow presented it, and the woman is absolutely not a sympathetic character. On balance, I think the real issue is not the woman, who is a life-long scofflaw. The real issue is those other four guys who got essentially no punishment for voter fraud. That does in fact sound like bullshit. Those were acts of knowing fraud, and one of them even alleged publicly that somebody else had used his late wife’s ballot, which became a cause célèbre for right-wing crackpots claiming evidence of voter fraud. It turned out there was fraud all right, and he is the one who committed it. He wanted to cast an extra Trump vote. That guy only got probation, which seems outrageous to me.
