Tina Peters will walk out of a Colorado prison Monday, ending roughly 20 months of incarceration as her legal team renews its effort to overturn the seven criminal convictions that sent her there.
Her exit from the La Vista Correctional Facility in Pueblo comes roughly 30 months earlier than originally scheduled, after Gov. Jared Polis commuted her sentence in mid-May and ordered her release at the start of June.
The one-time top election official in Mesa County, Peters will be released almost exactly five years after she helped an election conspiracist surreptitiously copy information from her county’s secure election systems. Some of that information was later published on right-wing media.
Peters, 70, has not yet had a parole hearing and didn’t have one scheduled as of late in the week, so it was unclear the conditions under which she will be released. In an interview earlier this month, one of her attorneys, Peter Ticktin, said the parole board would set her conditions at some point after her release.
According to a copy of Peters’ inmate file, two state law enforcement officers completed a “pre-parole investigation” of Peters’ home on Wednesday “and found nothing of concern.” The file also notes that Peters had a video call on May 15 at noon, nearly three hours before Polis’ office publicly announced her commutation. Ticktin said she had been called into the warden’s office, where she learned the news.
It’s unclear when or where exactly she will be released Monday. The Corrections Department declined to comment. Adrienne Mazzone, a spokeswoman for Peters’ legal team, said Thursday that “no details regarding (Peters’) release timing, location, visibility to the public, or any potential exclusive access are confirmed.”
As of Thursday afternoon, Peters’ location was still listed as the La Vista prison in Pueblo, according to a Corrections Department database.
She was initially sentenced to a total of nine years in jail and prison after her August 2024 conviction on three counts of attempting to influence a public servant, a count of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, and charges of first-degree official misconduct, violation of duty and failing to comply with the secretary of state.
Several months after the 2020 election, she directed Mesa County elections staff to turn off security cameras overseeing a secure room. She then gave another person’s access badge to a former professional surfer, who was affiliated with MyPillow CEO and election conspiracist Mike Lindell, so he could pretend to be a county employee and gain access to the equipment.
Three days after her sentence was commuted this month, Peters was “always in a good mood,” one prison staff member wrote in her file, which The Denver Post obtained through a public records request. “She said she was excited, that she will be leaving very soon.”
As Peters prepared for that departure, Ticktin and the rest of her legal team launched another salvo to challenge the trial that saw her convicted of four felonies and three misdemeanors.
Though the Colorado Court of Appeals in April ordered her trial judge to resentence Peters, the appellate judges unanimously upheld her underlying convictions. On May 21, after Polis issued the commutation, her legal team renewed the challenge with the state Supreme Court. Ticktin told The Post that Peters had not expressed any contrition for her crimes because she believed she had been targeted by a “globalist judge.”
Peters had not been resentenced before Polis announced his decision to release her. Three legal experts have told The Post that they were not aware of any other case in which a governor had granted clemency to an inmate who was in the middle of similar judicial proceedings.
In the recent petition to the state Supreme Court, Peters’ lawyers argued that her convictions should be tossed for three reasons: her trial judge should’ve held a hearing to see if a juror may have been influenced by the fact that their telephone lines had been severed during the early days of the trial; Peters was immune from prosecution under the U.S. Constitution’s supremacy clause; and her trial judge should’ve allowed Peters to discuss what she believed to be her duties as an election official.
The appellate court , affirming the trial court’s findings and dismissing as “meritless” Peters’ contention that she should’ve been allowed to tell the jury that she was investigating election fraud.
It will likely be months before the state high court decides whether to take up Peters’ appeal. If the justices do so, many more months will follow before the appeal is heard and adjudicated. Should she fail at the state level, Peters could then petition the U.S. Supreme Court for a new trial.
If one of those high courts throws out her convictions, prosecutors in Mesa County will have to determine if she should be retried.
, Peters’ attorneys wrote that she’d pledged “that she will not, in the future, engage in illegal conduct or commit offenses of the type for which she was convicted.” In a statement attached to the application, Peters said that her “work to ensure honest elections will continue” but that she will “make sure that my actions always follow the law.”
The application also noted she’s unlikely to commit the same offenses again, as she’s no longer a county clerk tasked with overseeing elections.
A prominent ally of President Donald Trump, Peters may also soon qualify for a payout from the nearly . Vice President JD Vance floated Peters as someone who should get compensation under the “anti-weaponization fund,” which was established as part of a settlement with Trump to give money to people who claim they were unjustly targeted by previous administrations.
