Professor Bennett Capers was quoted in The Guardian in an article examining the Pamela Moses case and the disparity among voter fraud crime sentencing.
In the late summer of 2020, Bruce Bartman went to Pennsylvania’s voter registration website and signed up his mother and mother-in-law to vote. Both women were dead.
A few months later, Bartman, who is white, requested a mail-in ballot for his late mother and cast her vote for Donald Trump. Bartman was arrested that December and charged with perjury and unlawful voting. Months later, he pleaded guilty, admitted he made a “stupid mistake”, was sentenced to five years of probation and barred from serving on a jury or voting for four years.
…
But the decision to reject a plea and go to trial, a constitutional right in the US, shouldn’t necessarily lead to a harsher sentence, experts say. For someone who already has a criminal record like Mason or Moses, accepting a plea deal for a new crime can have severe consequences, such as the revocation of probation or losing a job.
“Why is it we have a system where a prosecutor can basically say to somebody, you plead, we’ll extend your probation. If you don’t plead, you’re facing six years. Does that sound like the kind of system we want?” said Bennett Capers, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches law at Fordham University. “If [Moses] had taken the plea, nobody would have known about this case.”