Texas Appeals Court Tosses Former Prisoner’s Illegal Voting Conviction
On March 28, 2024, Texas’ Second District Court of Appeals (COA2D) overturned Crystal Mason’s illegal voting conviction, ruling that the state failed to present any evidence of criminal intent by the Black grandmother from Fort Worth to vote illegally in the 2016 election.
Mason’s crime was casting a ballot while on a three-year period of supervised release from federal prison. Having completed her five-year prison term for tax evasion, she believed that she was eligible. Though her name was absent from voter rolls, she was allowed to cast a provisional ballot—one of 4,000 cast in Tarrant County that year—which was later discarded. She was then charged with voting illegally and convicted. COA2D affirmed that conviction, but the state Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) found the applicable statute had been misconstrued and remanded the case, leading to Judge Wade Birdwell’s decision to vacate Mason’s conviction. See: Mason v. State, 687 S.W.3d 772 (Tex. App. 2024).
Texas election policing efforts have been led by Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has faced his own criminal charges for felony securities fraud, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Feb. 2021, p.56.] Mason’s case focused media attention on Paxton’s “crackdown,” which voting rights advocates blamed for unfairly entrapping voters who made an innocent mistake. A 2021 study by the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union found that at least 72% of the cases his office brought had targeted Black and Latino former prisoners, especially women.
The following year, CCA told Paxton that his office had no power to bring such cases without the consent of local prosecutors, freeing another former prisoner arrested for illegally voting while on parole in the 2020 election. But Hervis Rogers, 60—who gained national attention for waiting seven hours to cast a ballot and then sat in jail once arrested because he couldn’t afford bail—said that he would never vote again.
Mason vowed to continue working to prevent other former prisoners from enduring a similar ordeal. Alison Grinter Allen, Mason’s Dallas defense attorney, said that her conviction “should never have happened,” adding that “the harm that this political prosecution has done to shake Americans’ confidence in their own franchise is incalculable.” Meanwhile, Paxton cut a deal to have his charges dropped, avoiding a trial and more questions about his ethics.
Sources: NPR News, Texas Standard, Texas Tribune