A Colorado appeals court on Thursday overturned the prison sentence of Tina Peters, the most prominent election denier still behind bars for crimes stemming from the 2020 election. But the court did not immediately free Ms. Peters from prison or overturn her underlying conviction.
In a 3-to-0 ruling, the appeals court panel threw out the nine-year sentence handed down in 2024 to Ms. Peters, the former Mesa County clerk, and ordered that her case be sent back to the trial court in the county for resentencing. In 2024, a jury in her conservative Western Colorado hometown had convicted her of tampering with voting machines that were under her control.
President Trump has been demanding her release for months in a pressure campaign aimed at Colorado and its Democratic governor, Jared Polis.
The judges found that the trial judge who sentenced her had violated her free-speech rights by criticizing her as a “charlatan” and a snake-oil saleswoman who peddled false claims that the 2020 election had been rigged against Mr. Trump.
“The trial court’s comments about Peters’s belief in the existence of 2020 election fraud went beyond relevant considerations for her sentencing,” the judges wrote. “Her offense was not her belief, however misguided the trial court deemed it to be, in the existence of such election fraud; it was her deceitful actions in her attempt to gather evidence of such fraud.”
But the judges also rejected Mr. Trump’s attempt to issue a presidential pardon for Ms. Peters, noting that “the President’s pardon does not reach Peters’s state offenses.”
“We are unaware of — and can find no historical record of — any instance of a president pardoning someone for a state offense,” the judges wrote.
The ruling on Thursday is likely to intensify the legal battle swirling around Ms. Peters, 70.
With Ms. Peters in prison, the Trump administration has battered Colorado, cutting federal money to the state, moving to close a leading science center and relocating the headquarters of U.S. Space Command. Mr. Polis has suggested he is edging closer to granting clemency to Ms. Peters, a politically perilous decision for the governor in a solidly Democratic state.
Mr. Polis has spent months talking to friends and political allies in private about her case. In public, he has dropped a series of increasingly concrete hints that he might commute her sentence, calling it “harsh” and noting her advanced age. In March, Mr. Polis compared Ms. Peters’s sentence to that of a Democratic former state senator, Sonya Jaquez Lewis, who was convicted of similar charges but given a far lighter sentence.
“It is not lost on me that she was convicted of the exact same felony charge as Tina Peters — attempting to influence a public official — and yet Tina Peters, as a nonviolent first time offender got a nine year sentence,” Mr. Polis wrote. “Justice in Colorado and America needs to be applied evenly, you never know when you might need to depend on the rule of law.”
Aides in Mr. Polis’s office told Colorado lawmakers that the governor would not act on Ms. Peters’s sentence until the Court of Appeals handed down its ruling. A spokeswoman for the governor did not immediately respond to a message about the governor’s plans, now that the court has decided her case.
Mr. Polis, who will leave office early next year because of term limits, has occasionally bucked Democrats. He has offered praise to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the president’s health secretary.
His willingness to consider commuting Ms. Peters’s sentence has drawn strident opposition from nearly every elected Democrat in the state, and some moderate Republicans. They have questioned why their governor would speed up the release of a Trump supporter who helped fuel false claims of election fraud after the 2020 election.
But the Trump administration has offered its own reasons for Mr. Polis to act. Over the past few months, the administration has cut off transportation money earmarked for the state; relocated U.S. Space Command to Alabama from Colorado; vowed to dismantle a leading climate and weather research center in Boulder; and rejected disaster relief for rural counties in the state hammered by floods and wildfires.
The first veto of Mr. Trump’s second term killed a pipeline project to provide drinking water to the state’s eastern plains.
The president has not cited Ms. Peters’s case as a reason for any of these actions, but his calls for her release have been angry.
Jack Healy is based in Colorado and covers the west and southwest.
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