Texas court to hear appeal from woman sentenced to prison for voting while ineligible

Texas’ perfect prison appeals court acknowledged Wednesday it could perchance perhaps hear an appeal from a Texas woman who was sentenced to five years in prison for voting while inadvertently ineligible in 2016.

The case has attracted national attention thanks to the severity of the sentence and the woman, Crystal Mason, acknowledged she failed to know she was ineligible to vote on the time.

Many saw the severe sentence as an obvious effort to intimidate Dark voters. The case also comes amid an aggressive effort by Texas prosecutors, together with attorney general Ken Paxton, to prosecute even election crimes.

Mason was serving on supervised originate – which is comparable to probation – for a federal criminal conviction on the time, and Texas prohibits folks with criminal convictions from voting except they’ve carried out their sentences totally.

Officers overseeing Mason’s supervised originate testified at her trial that they never informed her she was ineligible to vote.

An appeals court in Fort Price upheld Mason’s conviction final year, asserting “the indisputable truth that she failed to know she was legally ineligible to vote was inappropriate to her prosecution”. The Texas court of prison appeals, the best prison appellate court in Texas, acknowledged Wednesday it could perchance perhaps hear the case.

“I am so thankful that the Texas court of prison appeals has made up our minds to hear my case,” Mason acknowledged in a textual allege message to the Guardian on Wednesday morning.

“I am continuing to have faith God thru this course of. And I firmly take into consideration that they are going to produce seemingly the most fascinating option and overturn this unjust conviction.”

Mason failed to pay grand attention to politics in 2016, but voted on election day because her mother pushed her to invent so.

Pollworkers can also no longer accumulate her identify within the list of registered voters when she showed up to vote, and offered her a provisional ballot, which they acknowledged would depend if it became out she was eligible.

Mason stuffed out the provisional ballot, which contains a minute-print affidavit affirming eligibility, and left. Because Mason was in truth ineligible to vote, election officers never counted her ballot.

Although Mason’s pollwas rejected, she was arrested months later and charged with illegal voting.

The option to cost Mason with illegal voting, a criminal, was uncommon. Between 2014 and 2019, there were 12,668 provisional ballots forged in Tarrant county, where Mason lives.

Although larger than 11,000 of them were rejected, Mason looks to be the superb one who was singled out and prosecuted for against the law.

The case upended Mason’s life. Once she was convicted of illegal voting, a federal earn revoked her supervised originate and despatched her lend a hand to federal prison for so a lot of months in slack 2018. She currently stays out of prison on an appeal bond in her express case.

Correct thru that point, her teenage daughter was accountable for running her household and her family almost misplaced their dwelling to foreclosure.

Correct thru an appellate hearing final year, Mason’s lawyers argued that Mason had no longer technically voted because her pollwas rejected.

Federal legislation entitles voters to gain admission to a provisional pollonce they display conceal up on the polls and there is a establish an insist to about their eligibility – exactly what came about in Mason’s case.

Texas legislation also criminalizes illegal voting in circumstances where someone “knows” they establish no longer seem to be eligible to vote; Mason’s lawyers argued that prosecutors failed to show Mason knew she was ineligible.

The Cato Institute, a libertarian thinktank, filed a temporary in toughen of Mason in December asserting “this case affords a regrettable instance of increasing a statute with prison penalties to punish behavior that was simply an trusty kind mistake”.

Prosecutors pointed to the indisputable truth that Mason signed a provisional pollaffidavit and testimony from a poll employee who acknowledged he instructed Mason to read it before signing.

“We are extremely blissful with the court’s option to hear Crystal Mason’s appeal. Her conviction and the sentence she got were grave injustices,” acknowledged Sophia Lin Lakin, deputy director of the ACLU’s voting rights mission, which is helping picture Mason.

One of the important thing witnesses within the case was a high college student who assisted Mason when she voted in 2016. The student, who was also Mason’s neighbor, told HuffPost in 2019 he was in truth aware Mason was ineligible to vote, but forgot when she showed up on the polls.