Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado offered the clearest signal yet late on Tuesday that he might commute the nine-year sentence of Tina Peters, the last high-profile Trump ally still in prison for crimes stemming from President Trump’s 2020 election loss.
Mr. Trump has waged an all-out assault on Colorado while pressuring Mr. Polis, a Democrat, to free Ms. Peters. He has blocked hundreds of millions of dollars in federal money from the Democratic-led state, moved the headquarters of U.S. Space Command from Colorado Springs to Alabama, promised to shutter a federal atmospheric research center in Boulder and vetoed an urgently needed water pipeline for rural Colorado.
Commuting Ms. Peters’s sentence now might appease Mr. Trump and stop those attacks, but it would set off a furious backlash among Democrats and imperil Mr. Polis’s political future. Democrats and some moderate Republicans in Colorado have spent months urging the governor to resist the pressure from Mr. Trump.
But on Tuesday night Mr. Polis wrote a social-media post that suggested he believed that Ms. Peters, a Republican former county clerk, had received too harsh a sentence when she was convicted of tampering with voting machines in a failed effort to show that the 2020 vote had been rigged against Mr. Trump.
The governor compared Ms. Peters’s case to that of a Democratic state senator, who, like Ms. Peters, was convicted of four felonies, including attempting to influence a public servant.
In that case, the authorities said, the former state senator, Sonya Jaquez Lewis, forged letters of support to try to rebut allegations that she was mistreating her staff. Ms. Lewis was sentenced this week to two years of probation and community service.
Mr. Polis said the disparity between the two women’s sentences “is not lost on me.”
“Justice in Colorado and America needs to be applied evenly, you never know when you might need to depend on the rule of law,” the governor wrote. “This is the context I am using as I consider cases like this that have sentencing disparities.”
He called Ms. Lewis, 68, a friend and said he was glad she did not have to endure prison. He then called Ms. Peters, 70, a “nonviolent, first-time offender.”
The response to Mr. Polis’s post on Tuesday from many was swift and full of outrage. The Denver district attorney, John Walsh, who prosecuted Ms. Lewis, rejected the governor’s comparison, saying in an interview that the cases against the two women “were not even in the same solar system in terms of the severity of their conduct.”
Colorado’s secretary of state, the Democrat Jena Griswold, said, “Peters organized the breach of the election equipment, broke the public trust and attacked the very foundations of our democratic process,” adding, “She should get no special treatment by the governor, and his statement is shocking.”
On Wednesday, Mr. Polis’s office said he was not considering a full pardon for Ms. Peters, and was “reviewing her application like anyone else applying for clemency.” The governor also extended the deadline for clemency applications until April 3. It is unclear when he might act on Ms. Peters’s case.
Peter Ticktin, a Florida-based lawyer for Ms. Peters who is also a close friend of Mr. Trump’s, hailed Mr. Polis’s move and said he believed that he could commute Ms. Peters’s sentence as soon as this week.
“It will be a victory as soon as the eggs are hatched,” Mr. Ticktin said. “If it ends up happening, her regaining her freedom will be a step toward righting a wrong.”
Trump Administration: Live Updates
Updated
- The Justice Dept. investigated Biden’s use of the autopen but brought no charges.
- Interior secretary travels to Venezuela for oil and mining expansion efforts.
- Justice Dept. seeks to stall states’ disbarments of its lawyers.
But on Wednesday, leading Democrats and some Republicans in Colorado expressed dismay.
The state’s attorney general, Phil Weiser, a Democrat whose office helped prosecute Ms. Peters and who hopes to succeed Mr. Polis as governor, said he worried that freeing her would amount to a capitulation to Mr. Trump’s bullying and undermine Colorado’s justice and elections systems.
“This is critical for our elections that she not be giving any type of victory,” Mr. Weiser said in an interview.
Senator Michael Bennet, who is also running in the Democratic primary for governor, reiterated his opposition to commuting Ms. Peters, saying in a statement that “bending to Trump’s lawlessness will only produce more lawlessness.”
Dan Rubinstein, the district attorney in Mesa County, said in a statement that sentences for the same crime can vary greatly and are at the discretion of the judge.
“The suggestion that everyone convicted under the same statute should receive the same sentence overlooks why the legislature created a range in the first place: no two crimes and no two defendants are the same,” said Mr. Rubinstein, a Republican.
He added that the court had imposed “a sentence within the range set by law” after an extensive trial.
“While the governor has the legal authority to modify that sentence, doing so here would be a gross injustice to the affected citizens I represent,” Mr. Rubinstein said.
For months, Mr. Polis has been wavering on Ms. Peters’s case, meeting privately with elected officials and election clerks to discuss his thinking while musing publicly about the degree of sentencing. For his part, Mr. Trump was unleashing a torrent of financial attacks on the state.
In a mid-January interview with CBS News, Mr. Polis indicated that he was weighing Ms. Peters’s lack of contrition — she still argues that she did nothing wrong — against her age and absence of previous criminal history.
The state’s senators, both Democrats, and other top officials in the party have uniformly urged Mr. Polis not to free Ms. Peters, arguing that she was fairly prosecuted, convicted and sentenced in her staunchly Republican hometown in Mesa County. Many Democrats argue that freeing Ms. Peters would also not actually stop Mr. Trump’s attacks against Colorado.
“We’ll continue to be in the cross hairs,” State House Speaker Julie McCluskie, a Democrat, said in an interview earlier this winter.
Ms. Griswold, who is running for attorney general, said that the governor was drawing a false parallel between the convictions of Ms. Lewis and Ms. Peters.
Her comments were echoed by Matt Crane, a former Republican elections official who is now the executive director of the Colorado Clerks Association. He said the two cases Mr. Polis is comparing are “not apples to apples; its like comparing an apple to a Volkswagen.”
“It seems like he’s trying to tie himself in knots to let Peters out while he knows he shouldn’t,” Mr. Crane said.
Ms. Peters’s plea for clemency to the governor comes at the same time as her legal appeal has been progressing. In January, a Colorado appeals panel took issue with comments made by Judge Matthew D. Barrett during her sentencing, noting that her spreading of election conspiracy theories was not directly a part of her conviction.
“The court cannot punish her for her First Amendment rights,” Appeals Judge Craig Welling said.
New briefs in her appeal were filed in January, after some confusion during oral arguments over sentencing law.
Jack Healy is based in Colorado and covers the west and southwest.
The post Colorado Governor Signals He’ll Commute Sentence of Election Denier appeared first on New York Times.
