Hope this works. It would be one small good thing to come out of that otherwise harmful law.
Crystal Mason, the Tarrant County woman whose illegal voting conviction has garnered national attention, is asking for a Texas appeals court to overturn her conviction under a new provision of Texas’ recently adopted election law Senate Bill 1.
Mason, 46, was sentenced to five years in prison for attempting to cast a ballot in 2016′s presidential election. At the time, Mason was on supervised release from a federal tax fraud conviction and was prohibited from voting in Texas.
Her lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union this week filed a brief with the Texas Court of Criminal of Appeals citing the state’s new election law that took effect earlier this month in asking for her conviction to be overturned.
Tucked within SB 1 that was passed by the Texas Legislature in this year’s second special session is a section erasing criminal penalties for felons who attempt to vote without knowing that they were committing a crime. That portion of the law came about with Mason’s conviction in mind.
“SB 1 is a repudiation of Ms. Mason’s conviction and five-year sentence of incarceration,” the brief states.
[…]
Her attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union declined a request for comment. The Tarrant County District Attorney’s office, which prosecuted and has argued against overturning Mason’s conviction, said in an emailed statement that SB 1 has no bearing on Mason’s case.
“Even under the new law, she is guilty,” office spokeswoman Anna Tinsley Williams said. “She wasn’t convicted simply for casting the provisional ballot; she was convicted for casting a provisional ballot when she knew she was ineligible to vote. Knowledge of ineligibility is the key. This is not a case of mistaken voting.”
See here and here for some background. House Democrats had negotiated an amendment in the original bill during the regular session that would have retroactively covered Mason’s case, but it was taken out in the conference committee version by Senators on the committee, and that breaking of the faith was one of the catalysts for the initial quorum break during the regular session, which prevented the bill from getting a final vote. In the second special session, after House Dems had returned from Washington, a similar amendment was added to the House version of the bill, but it again ran into resistance in the Senate, with bill author Bryan Hughes the main obstacle. (How bad does Hughes look when even Briscoe fricking Cain was willing to add this provision to the bill?) If people can read the final version of the bill to include or not include Crystal Mason in its scope, then it’s at best a tossup what the CCA will do, and given their usual pro-prosecution bias, I can’t say I’m optimistic. But it’s sure worth the try.