DENVER — Months before Colorado Gov. Jared Polis freed felonious election denier Tina Peters from prison, his own clemency board voted unanimously — twice — to reject her bid for early release, according to two of the board’s members.
Read more To release Tina Peters, Polis ignored our board’s unanimous recommendation for denial (Opinion)
To release Tina Peters, Polis ignored our board’s unanimous recommendation for denial (Opinion)
The first vote, taken under a cloak of secrecy, came in January, when the board reviewed Peters’ application during one of its meetings. At those gatherings, board members wrestle with some of the state’s toughest criminal cases, poring over handwritten pleas from convicted killers and others serving life sentences.
A month later, the board got an unusual request from the Democratic governor’s office, which was under enormous political pressure from President Donald Trump to free Peters, two board members said — to take a second look.
The clemency board obliged, but again, its vote was a unanimous no.
Colorado’s 11-person clemency advisory board, which is appointed by the governor, operates largely in secret. Its meetings are not open to the public, its members are told not to take notes, and they do not publicly discuss the clemency recommendations they make to the governor, who has the final say in issuing pardons and commutations.
But two Denver lawyers who serve on the board, Hannah Seigel Proff and Azra Taslimi, said they had decided to speak out now, pulling back the curtain on one of their most fateful cases, after Polis overruled the board’s recommendations in May and cut short Peters’ nine-year prison sentence.
“It really was a punch in the gut,” Proff said. “It flies in the face of justice.”
Peters, 70, a former county clerk in western Colorado, was convicted of tampering with voting machines under her control in a plot to show that the 2020 election had been rigged against Trump, a case that made her a martyr to the election-denial movement and a hero to the president, who spent months browbeating Polis to free her.
It is not unusual for Polis and his clemency board to disagree. Former members of the board said the governor regularly rejected commutations they had supported. In an interview last month, Polis said he had granted other reprieves that the board had voted against.
“I also consult with and hear from many, many other people,” Polis said. “And obviously, we’ve heard from thousands of people” about Peters, he added.
But the case of Peters, with its inextricable ties to Trump, has drawn far more scrutiny than other clemency pleas. It may end up shaping Polis’ legacy and political future after his two terms as Colorado’s idiosyncratic governor.
Polis has stood by his decision to grant Peters a commutation, and said the move was not influenced by Trump’s pressure. He has said her nine-year sentence was too long for a nonviolent, first-time offender, and that she had been unduly punished for her embrace of stolen-election conspiracies, violating her right to free speech, no matter how odious that speech might be.
Eric Maruyama, a spokesperson for the governor, said the clemency board’s actions were private, and did not bind the governor. Polis has granted 135 pardons and 34 commutations since he took office in 2019, as well as more than 4,000 pardons for marijuana possession.
“Gov. Polis makes final clemency decisions based on what he believes to be right, not based on politics or political connections,” Maruyama said. “Given the attention on the Peters case, her clemency was clearly granted in spite of politics, not because of it.”
But Peters’ critics — including many Republicans in her conservative hometown — called her an unrepentant conspiracy theorist who had not earned mercy.
Polis has already paid a political price for freeing Peters. He was censured by his own Colorado Democratic Party, and dozens of fellow Democrats have condemned the decision.
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But the criticism from Proff and Taslimi is notable since it comes from two lawyers appointed by Polis to his clemency advisory review board. Proff has served on the volunteer board for more than seven years, and Taslimi has been on it for about three years.
In an interview Wednesday, they said that Polis’ decision had undercut Colorado’s clemency system by freeing an inmate with powerful political allies while dozens of other deserving applicants remained locked up.
“It’s very clear it’s motivated by politics and influence,” Taslimi said.
The board, which includes former public defenders, law enforcement officials and a victims’ rights representative, reviews more than 100 commutation applications a year, and is often a last resort for inmates who have exhausted their other appeals.
“Some of these applications bring us to tears,” Proff said. “Ms. Peters’ application just felt empty.”
Taslimi and Proff, who are former public defenders, said Peters had not taken responsibility or expressed true remorse in her application.
They said Peters had also cut the line by seeking clemency while her case was still being appealed. She had been waiting to be resentenced after her original sentence was thrown out by a Colorado appeals court in April.
“This is not how the process works,” Taslimi said. “It reaffirms there is a two-tiered justice system. We can’t continue to operate in this way.”
After the board’s first vote, the governor’s legal office reached out in February to say that Peters had updated her application, and asked the board to take another look.
Proff said little had changed in Peters’ application. The board, she said, remained unpersuaded.
“It was a strong ‘no’ the first time,” she said. “It was a strong ‘no’ the second time.”
Peters walked out of prison June 1 and within hours, she was appearing on a right-wing podcast hosted by former Trump aide Steve Bannon, condemning Democrats for cheating in elections and insisting that she had been imprisoned as “retribution” for exposing voting machines that changed people’s votes. There is no evidence to support her claims.
She is on parole and is appealing her 2024 conviction on four felony charges to the Colorado Supreme Court.
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Peter Ticktin, a lawyer for Peters, said he had not been informed of the clemency board’s deliberations, but said he was “not surprised, as everything in Colorado’s government seems to be political, and we know which party is calling the shots.”
Proff and Taslimi said they had considered resigning from the board, but opted to stay, in part because it faces a backlog of hundreds of cases.
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“I do love this work,” Proff said. “We just have to say something.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
