Most people probably never saw the opinion column two members of Colorado’s Clemency Board wrote describing the injustice and immorality of Governor Jared Polis’ commutation of Tina Peters’ prison sentence. The Denver Post published the op-ed on June 18, 2026, and the New York Times published information about about it on the same day, but it was ignored by local news outlets.
In the commentary, two members of Gov. Jared Polis’ Clemency Board, Azra Taslimi and Hannah Seigel Proff, who together have decades of experience in criminal law, spoke out against Polis’ decision to grant clemency to Tina Peters. They reveal that the 11-member Clemency Board, whose members are all appointed by the Governor and operate in near total secrecy, had voted unanimously not once, but twice, to deny clemency for Peters, but Polis chose to overrule the Board’s recommendation and instead short-circuit her nine-year prison sentence.
The women describe the typical clemency process as a grueling, multi-year hurdle that underprivileged and minority applicants usually have to navigate alone, without legal help, and say it often results in applications being denied even after prisoners have put long, sincere work into their own rehabilitation. In bypassing the strict clemency standards for Peters, the authors argue that Polis revealed clearly that there is an unfair, two-tiered justice system that “rewards proximity to power.”
Tina’s fake “I made a mistake” statement
To justify his decision to spring Peters from prison, Polis cited a single line in Peters’ application in which she claimed she had “made a mistake.” But the Clemency Board members who reviewed her application — and who have reviewed the applications of hundreds of other people — could clearly see that that line was just “performative accountability that does not warrant mercy under our set criteria.” The authors note that just hours after she was released from prison, Peters went on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast and far from taking any responsibility for her crimes, said she had made no mistake at all, and that she had been imprisoned as retribution for “exposing the election machines that allowed the vote to be flipped.”
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Jumping ahead of everyone else
Clemency is normally a final remedy prisoners can seek only after all appellate avenues have been completely exhausted, but in Peters’ case, the legal process was still actively playing out. The Colorado Court of Appeals had just upheld her conviction and ordered her to be resentenced, meaning Gov. Polis intervened prematurely in a functioning court process. As far as the Clemency Board was concerned, it was not yet time to consider clemency for Peters, since her court process had not yet played out.
Perhaps most importantly, the authors point out that Polis’ decision degrades the intent and integrity of the state’s mercy system, and sends the message to hundreds of other applicants awaiting rulings on their clemency applications — and to all Colorado citizens — that the rules that are supposed to guide the process are easily broken for politically well-connected people, but remain rigidly in pace for everyone else.
The authors wrote,
“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.”
I urge everyone to read the full op-ed here.
The New York Times article about it is here.
What in the devil was Polis’s basis for his decision. All the other people that are working on getting clemency was my first thought.
Polis has been a pretty good Governor for the last 8 years, but he will only be remembered for this.
Now, should he go through all the rest of the clemency cases and rush some of them through?