We are two members of Gov. Jared Polis’s Clemency Board. This appointed position requires us to review applications for clemency and make recommendations about who should receive a commutation, a pardon or nothing at all.
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Between us, we have spent decades in the criminal legal system, first as public defenders representing people who couldn’t afford to choose their lawyer, and now as the people charged with administering the system’s final and precious remedy, clemency.
We have reviewed hundreds of applications that moved us to tears. People who spent decades atoning for a single terrible decision, who attended college or seminary behind bars, completed countless programs, developed curricula for other incarcerated people, mentored young offenders, and raised thousands of dollars for victims’ rights organizations.
Along with nine other members of the board, we have read applications supported by prosecutors who tried the case, by prison wardens who watched the transformation happen, and even by victims themselves.
And we have seen the governor fail to act or delay many of these applications.
The bedrock principle of this work is that every application is evaluated strictly on its merits, without fear or favor. The same standard is applied the same way, regardless of who is asking and who is watching.
It is that principle, the one we have staked our participation on, the one we have applied to every file that has crossed our desks, that compels us to come forward now.
Tina Peters was recommended for denial. Our board voted no. Twice. Unanimously.
The governor granted her clemency anyway. The problem is not about Tina Peters’ case in isolation. It is what his decision reveals. That the system bends for some and holds firm against everyone else.
The numbers behind the queue
The Clemency Board is not just the last stop before the governor’s desk. We are, for most applicants, the end of the line. By the time someone reaches our board, they have already exhausted every other option available to them.
They have appealed their conviction. They have challenged their sentence. They have filed motions, petitions, and requests for post-conviction relief.
Clemency is not a shortcut. It is what remains when every door has already closed. And it is extraordinarily hard to obtain in Colorado. The process can take one to three years and requires navigating a bureaucracy that the state public defender’s office has described as “nearly impossible” for those without legal representation, and yet most applicants must navigate this process alone.
They handwrite their letters from prison cells. They gather supporting documents with limited access to resources. They submit their applications and wait, sometimes for years, with no meaningful updates and no right to an explanation if they are denied.
In our time on this board, we have recommended clemency for applicants we believed had genuinely reformed themselves. People who had done everything right under nearly impossible conditions and whom we believed deserved a second chance. The governor has acted on only a fraction of those recommendations.
It would be dishonest to tell this story without saying plainly what it reflects. The people in our queue are not a random sample of Colorado. They reflect what decades of unequal justice have built. Hispanic Coloradans make up roughly 21% of the state’s population, but over 32% of its male prison population. Black Coloradans make up just 4.5% of the state’s population, but 18% of its male prison population.
Empirical data show that people of color are treated more harshly than their white counterparts at every stage, the harm compounding at every turn. They arrive at our table having already lost so much, asking with whatever dignity they have left for one act of grace from a system that has shown them very little.
We ask the same questions of every applicant: Have you earned this? Have you done the work? Have you shown us you are more than the worst thing you have ever done? We apply those questions consistently, because consistency is not a bureaucratic nicety; it is the only thing that makes this process defensible to the people it most often fails. For most people, this process moves glacially, demands everything, and yields little.
Yet it broke, quickly and dramatically, for the benefit of Tina Peters. It is with all of those people in mind that we say what happened here was wrong.
What Peters’ application actually said
Gov. Polis pointed to a statement in Peters’ final application, submitted after two board denials and months of escalating political pressure, in which she acknowledged she “made a mistake.” We read that application. It did not reflect accountability; instead, it was a reframing likely written by her legal team. Peters recounted events “through her eyes” and sought to justify conduct that twelve jurors had deemed criminal.
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As a board, we see this pattern regularly. And we deny these applications regularly. Not because we are unsympathetic, but because performative accountability does not warrant mercy under our set criteria.
Genuine accountability and reform require a reckoning that shows up in how a person speaks about their actions and those they have harmed. The applicants we hold to this standard do not have presidents making threats in their names. They face this process alone. And we hold the line. There is another dimension to this that cannot be overlooked.
For most applicants, clemency becomes available only after their appellate rights have been exhausted. Peters had not reached that point. Her conviction had just been upheld by the Colorado Court of Appeals, which simultaneously ordered her resentencing. A functioning legal process was actively unfolding. The courts were working.
The governor stepped in front of them. Clemency is not an accelerated appeal. It is not a pressure release valve for politically inconvenient sentences. It exists for the people the legal system cannot reach, not for the people who simply prefer not to wait for it. Using it this way, for this person, at this moment, doesn’t just dishonor the process. It degrades the remedy for everyone else who is waiting their turn at the only door they have left.
What Peters did with her freedom
Within hours of her release, Peters appeared on a podcast and immediately resumed her attacks on the integrity of U.S. elections. On Steve Bannon’s podcast, she repeated the debunked conspiracy theory that voting machines cheated Donald Trump out of reelection in 2020 and portrayed herself as a martyr to the effort to expose it. She called her release a miracle.
She expressed no contrition. She offered no acknowledgment of the harm her conduct caused to the clerks who were threatened, to the election workers whose lives were upended, to the democratic institutions she exploited from a position of public trust. The governor said he was moved by her admission that she made a mistake. She walked out of prison and told the world she made no mistake at all.
Power is at play
We have always known there are two systems of justice in this country. One for the powerful and one for everyone else. We have seen it in courtrooms, in sentencing hearings, in the files that cross our desks.
What we did not expect was to watch it play out inside the very process we were appointed to protect. Governors override advisory boards. We understand that. That is not what keeps us up at night. What keeps us up at night is the contrast.
The criminal legal system does not fail people randomly. It fails the same people, at every stage, in the same direction.
A ProPublica investigation found that in the federal pardon process, after controlling for all relevant factors, white petitioners were nearly four times as likely as minority petitioners to receive a pardon. Of 62 Black applicants in the sample, not a single one received a pardon. Our board exists, in part, to resist that history, to be the room where the merits are the only thing that matters.
Tina Peters clemency is the two-tiered system operating exactly as it always has, rewarding proximity to power, and leaving everyone else to absorb the cost.
The governor found urgency for Peters, just not for the powerless.
Gov. Jared Polis overruled his own clemency board to release Tina Peters
The high cost of Polis’ decision
Hundreds of applications remain in the queue for clemency during the last months of Polis’ final term. What these applicants know as a result of the decision to grant Tina Peters clemency is that the door to mercy opens differently depending on who is knocking and who is standing behind you when you knock.
Every person who now files a clemency application in Colorado will do so knowing something they didn’t know before, as a result of the Tina Peters decision: That the standards these applications are measured by are not the same for everyone, that the door to mercy opens differently depending on who is knocking and who is standing behind you when you knock.
Azra Taslimi is a partner at Rathod | Mohamedbhai LLC in Denver where she practices civil rights and employment law. Before entering private practice, she worked as a public defender. She was appointed to the clemency board in May of 2023. Hannah Seigel Proff is the founding partner of Proff Law LLC in Denver where she practices criminal law. With 18 years of experience as a criminal defense attorney, Proff was appointed to the clemency board in 2019 and reappointed in 2023.
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