Colorado Politics laid out the weird little soap opera we are all watching: Gov. Jared Polis is reportedly considering a sentence reduction for Tina Peters, the former Mesa County clerk now in state prison after a jury conviction on multiple counts tied to election equipment access. And yes, this matters in Weld County, because the second a governor treats justice like a trading card, every county and every citizen gets the message: your institutions are just props in somebody else’s deal.
Here’s what happened, according to the piece. Peters was elected clerk in 2018. The article recounts a later-discovered ballot box with 574 ballots that were never collected or counted. It also says she failed to file financial disclosures for three years. After the 2020 election, she allowed an unauthorized person access to electronic voting machines to copy hard drives. She was prosecuted by a Republican DA, convicted by a Mesa County jury on seven counts, and acquitted on three. The judge sentenced her to nine years and said he believed she would do it again. That’s the factual skeleton the author is working from.
Now to the part they skip when they pretend this is some lofty seminar on mercy. This is politics. Not “politics is in everything” politics. Hardball, transactional, use-what-you’ve-got politics. In 7-years of dancing the Polis dance, I’ve come to recognize exactly who Polis is. He is ruthless. He is 100% partisan. And the “libertarian leanings” the press banty about is my favorite ongoing fairy tale, right up there with “this fee isn’t a tax.”
Polis is a machine. Period. He whips his own caucus into shape, he wields power, and he has no problem lying or switching course when it suits him. I don’t have the receipts to litigate every example in a newspaper column, but the pattern is obvious enough that normal people can smell it without a focus group.
So let’s not pretend this commutation chatter is mainly about proportionality, age, or Colorado’s tendency toward leniency. Maybe those factors exist. But Polis is 100% transactional. What’s in it for me? In the performative political game of chicken between the governor and the president, Peters looks like a bargaining chip. Nothing more. Nothing less.
And before anybody hyperventilates: A jury of her peers found Peters guilty. I am not here to debate that. But in soft-on-crime Colorado, sentencing consistency matters. If the standard is real, show the numbers. If it is not, fix it.
If the governor wants to commute, publish a written standard and apply it across the board. Same rules for everyone, not just high-profile cases.
Source: Colorado Politics
