Polis fires the two Commutation Board members who let the public know he defied their Board’s multiple unanimous recommendations against commuting Tina Peters’ sentence

In a Trump-like strike of retribution, Governor Jared Polis has fired the two members of Colorado’s Clemency Board who dared to speak out to let the public know that he violated their Board’s unanimous recommendations that he not commute Tina Peters’ prison sentence. They said they could see from her application that Peters clearly was not the least bit genuinely remorseful about what she had done, and commuting her sentence would be far too premature because her case was still being litigated in the courts. The rules for considering clemency require all legal avenues be exhausted before clemency can be considered.

By releasing Peters, Polis was widely viewed as caving to convicted felon/sexual abuser/President Trump, who had been berating and threatening him for months over Peters’ continued incarceration.

Polis had appointed the two Clemency Board members who spoke out, Azra Taslimi and Hannah Seigel Proff. Both are attorneys and together they have decades of experience in criminal law. Taslimi was named a Lawyer of the Year in 2025 for her work defending civil rights. The two women revealed that the 11-member Clemency Board — which operates in near total secrecy — had voted unanimously not once, but twice, to deny clemency for Peters, based largely on what they deemed the obvious disingenuousness of her claims of remorse in her clemency application. Despite this, Polis overruled the Board’s recommendations and freed Peters years early, without regard to the harm it might cause to the state, the nation or democracy.

The New York Times wrote that the two women who spoke out were well aware of the confidentiality policy that governed their work, but felt “the public had a right to know how the governor’s clemency board had grappled with one of the most consequential cases to ever cross its desk.”

The attorneys said they were disappointed in Polis’ move to fire them. Ms. Taslimi said, “He’s saying the public doesn’t have the right to know his own advisory board told him no — twice. He’s not protecting a process. He’s protecting himself from scrutiny.” Ms. Taslimi added, “We spoke up about this because it shows the process punishes people without power, and protects the people with it. Speaking out has a cost, and here we are.”