December 10, 2025 02:03 PM UTC

If At First You Don't Succeed in Freeing a Convicted Felon...

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• by: Colorado Pols

President Trump has been on a rampage in recent weeks about his inability to spring former Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters from jail in Colorado, where she is currently serving a nine-year sentence for her actions related to breaking into her own election computers in a fruitless attempt to prove 2020 election fraud.

Governor Jared Polis rightly denied requests by the Department of Justice to take custody of Peters so that she could presumably be moved to a low-security federal prison where someone might eventually “forget” to lock her cell door. On Monday, a no-hope legal maneuver also predictively failed. As Colorado Newsline reports:

A federal magistrate judge in Colorado on Monday dismissed former Mesa County clerk Tina Peters’ petition for a writ of habeas corpus, one of several long-shot legal maneuvers Peters’ attorneys and allies in the election-denial movement have sought to use to secure her release from state prison.

Peters is serving a nine-year sentence for her role in a breach of her office’s election systems, part of an attempt to find evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. She has appealed her August 2024 conviction in state court, arguing that her imprisonment violates her First Amendment right of free speech, and separately filed a habeas corpus petition in federal court, seeking her release on bond while the state appeal is pending.

Scott T. Varholak, chief magistrate judge of the U.S. District Court of Colorado, wrote in a 12-page order that Peters had raised “important constitutional questions concerning whether the trial court improperly punished her more severely because of her protected First Amendment speech.” But in dismissing her petition, he sided with arguments made in the federal case by the Colorado attorney general’s office, which cited longstanding precedent against “federal court interference with state court proceedings.”

Perhaps expecting that rejection, Peters’ attorney, Peter Tiktin, sent a bonkers letter to the White House outlining why Peters deserves a Presidential pardon that Trump legally can’t grant anyway. Tiktin’s letter argues that Trump does, in fact, have the right to pardon someone for state crimes because of some convoluted belief about pronouns used when discussing the United States:

We are not attorneys but this logic seems…well, let’s go with “strained.”

Later in the letter, Tiktin explains that Peters is being housed in a prison alongside violent offenders and is not safe. As Tiktin writes:

About 6 months ago, Mrs. Petes was threatened with harm. Her life was threatened by a group of inmates, to stab her and to kill her. This was reported to the FBI and DOJ, which had agents interview her. She was moved to a different. unit.

In the new unit, she was attacked by other prisoners 3 times in different locations where guards had to pull inmates off of her.

Based on our knowledge of prison movies, perhaps Peters just needs to join a gang.

We’re joking, of course. But here’s the part where Tiktin’s claims get very specific; you’ll see why this is important in a moment:

Presently, she is in the smallest cell of her unit. It was formerly used for a washing machine and drier. She and her cellmate have just 21 square feet, or 3 feet by 7 feet. [Pols note: Math checks out] Only 1 of the cellmates can stand at a time.

Lately, she has been required to take drug tests in the evening, when she otherwise would have been sleeping. That process takes hours during which she mostly was required to sit on cold cement.

This was while enduring a chronic cough which was similar to the cough she had before surgery for lung cancer where a third of one of her lungs was removed in 2016. Yet, all she was given was an X-ray. Moreover, she was 3 places in her spine which are degenerative, and the prison refuses to provide a mattress more than 2 inches thick even though the prison possesses 40 mattresses which are 4 inches thick and stored and not used.

The area also has black mold to which she is exposed.

The prison is also overrun by lizard people and Peters is only served bok choy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Probably.

Most of these claims don’t pass the smell test. Why can’t two people stand up at the same time in a 21-square-foot room? Why are drug tests taking several hours, when most such tests only require urinating in a cup or having blood drawn? What are doctors supposed to do beyond ordering an X-ray if the images don’t show a specific problem?

And the part about the thickness of mattresses? Prison sucks. It’s supposed to suck. If you don’t want to go to prison, don’t commit felonies. This is all pretty straightforward…

…Until it is not, and the Attorney General of the United States launches an extremely thinly-veiled investigation that is probably only coincidentally related to Tina Peters:

You can see where this is headed. The next step for Trump’s personal attorneys DOJ will be to claim that conditions in Peters’ prison are so abhorrent that she must be released or remanded to federal custody. We’re sure all of the other inmates in that prison will get the same treatment.

What every Coloradan — indeed, every American — should be asking is why the Trump administration is expending so many resources and using up so much time and money in order to free a convicted felon who was prosecuted by a fellow Republican in front of a jury of her peers in beet red Mesa County.

Do federal law enforcement officials really have this much free time on their hands? Maybe they are busy trying to arrest drug traffickers that Trump won’t eventually pardon.

It’s a bummer that Tina Peters will spend most of the rest of her life in prison. Really, that would suck. But a Republican Party that talks a lot about accountability for criminals shouldn’t be contradicting itself so blatantly.

The moral of this story is the same as it has always been: Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.