A Colorado appeals court ruled that Tina Peters should be resentenced. Peters, who served as an elections clerk in Mesa County, was previously sentenced to nine years in prison.
The Colorado Court of Appeals found that a lower court wrongly considered her role in election fraud theories in deciding her sentence. “[A]fter reviewing Peters’s other appellate contentions, we affirm the judgment of conviction in part and reverse it in part,” the ruling reads. “Specifically, we affirm Peters’s convictions, but we reverse her sentence because it was based in part on improper consideration of her exercise of her right to free speech. We remand the case to the trial court with directions for resentencing.”
“Here, the trial court’s comments about Peters’s belief in the existence of 2020 election fraud went beyond relevant considerations for her sentencing,” the court’s opinion says. “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.”
President Trump announced in December that he pardoned former Colorado county clerk Tina Peters, who was convicted of election interference in 2024. In March of last year, the Department of Justice filed a Statement of Interest for the case, stating that the matter appeared “oriented more toward inflicting political pain than toward pursuing actual justice or legitimate governmental objectives.”
Peter then urged a Colorado court to honor her pardon. “There is no question that the Pardon forgave federal offenses,” the motion says, as reported by Colorado Public Radio. “However, the Pardon also forgave Colorado state court convictions for actions Clerk Peters ‘may have committed or taken part in related to election integrity and security’ during the applicable time period.”
