Former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters’ belief that the 2020 election denied Donald Trump the presidency, and that her county’s voting results could prove it, rippled across the state and the country, harmfully undermining confidence in elections. After Gov. Jared Polis commuted her nearly nine-year sentence to four years – against the state clemency board’s unanimous recommendation – she was released June 1 and has picked up her claims again, including on conservative talk shows and in an appearance with the president at the White House.
Coloradans know about the clemency board’s opposition – twice, unanimously – because two board members, Denver attorneys Hannah Seigel Proff and Azra Taslimi, disclosed the votes to The New York Times and then wrote an opinion piece for The Denver Post, a story that went national. Saying the two violated mandated confidentiality, Polis fired them.
It’s easy to think the firings resulted from Polis being upset that the clemency decision was clearly his alone, without any board member’s concurrence. But secrecy is firmly in the board’s policies – Polis’ own 2019 executive order requires that all board proceedings and records be kept confidential, available solely to the governor and his staff members – so Polis was within his rights.
Within his rights, but the optics are hard to miss: dismissing officials for public dissent mirrors the retaliatory firings that have become routine in Trump’s Washington. And we still don’t fully know why Polis acted. He cited a too-harsh sentence and Peters’ free speech – an irony not lost on the two members fired for exercising theirs. They told The New York Times the decision was motivated by politics and influence; Taslimi called it “selective mercy.”
Was Polis currying favor with a president who keeps retaliating against Colorado, a blue state? The punishments have piled up: Space Command headquarters stripped from Colorado Springs; disaster aid denied for Southwest Colorado’s flood recovery and the Northwest’s wildfire recovery; a vetoed water pipeline for southeastern Colorado; childcare, safety-net, public health and clean-energy funds frozen or cut; the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder gutted. Much of it came explicitly amid Trump’s demands that Colorado free Peters. Because the process is sealed, Coloradans are left to guess.
The governor is free to override the board; that’s not in doubt. But Coloradans deserve to know how the board operates and the clemency requests that come before it. How often do the board and a governor disagree, and why? In subsequent reporting, the two fired members said there’s a backlog of at least a hundred clemency requests. Does that quantity warrant additional board resources? And is confidentiality at every stage truly necessary? When granted with merit, clemency determines the remainder of an individual’s life.
Issuing clemency is a powerful right. Its workings should be made clear and its results applied fairly. Sunshine is warranted. Jared Polis and Tina Peters have brought this to the forefront.
