A Texas county prosecutor is seeking to reinstate the conviction of Crystal Mason, a Black woman whose five-year sentence for voter fraud put the sweeping nature of Texas’ strict voting laws under heavy scrutiny.
Phil Sorrells, Tarrant County’s criminal district attorney, said in a statement on Thursday that his office has asked the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to reinstate Mason’s guilty verdict.
“Voting is a cornerstone of our democracy,” Sorrells said. “This office will protect the ballot box from fraudsters who think our laws don’t apply to them.”
Mason was sentenced in 2018 for casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 election with a poll worker’s help. She was on supervised release at the time and has said she did not realize she could not vote. (People on parole, probation or supervised release are ineligible to vote under Texas law.) Her ballot was rejected, and Tarrant County prosecutors pursued a case against her, which resulted in her conviction.
The Second Court of Appeals initially upheld that conviction but later revisited her case on instruction from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. The appeals court then overturned her conviction in March, finding no evidence that she knew she was ineligible to vote when she cast her ballot.
That decision was meant to close the chapter on a case that illustrated how formerly incarcerated people have been disenfranchised at the ballot box and the inconsistency of voting laws across the country. As my colleague Steve Benen has pointed out, a number of white voters in other states have also been caught voting illegally, none of whom received as heavy a sentence as Mason.
Beyond his assertion that the appeals court applied the wrong standard of review to the case, it’s unclear why the Tarrant County prosecutor is renewing his effort to put Mason behind bars. Tommy Buser-Clancy, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Texas, told The Texas Tribune that it was “disappointing,” but they were “confident that justice will ultimately prevail.”
“It is time to give Ms. Mason peace with her family,” Clancy said.