March 10, 2026 09:21 AM UTC

Tina Peters Is Not Sorry

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• by: Colorado Pols

Last week, the impasse over the continued incarceration of convicted former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, which has brought the confused wrath of President Donald Trump down upon the state with promised and delivered “harsh measures,” took another high-drama turn as Gov. Jared Polis gave his strongest signal yet that he is leaning toward a commutation of Peters’ sentence–a signal that was met with furious pushback from across the state and nation, as Democratic leaders and election officials from both parties begged Gov. Polis to not give in to Trump’s pressure campaign. With Trump working tirelessly to undermine confidence in the upcoming midterm elections Republicans are widely expected to lose, Peters’ release would constitute a major victory for the election conspiracy theorists who fueled Peters’ criminal ambitions and support Trump’s refusal to accept his 2020 defeat to this day.

Since last week’s outcry, Gov. Polis has offered one critical stipulation Peters must agree with to be eligible for a sentence commutation: remorse. Every previous pardon or commutation issued by the governor went to convicts who had acknowledged and repented of their crimes. But as readers know, Tina Peters has not only failed to show remorse at any point during her years-long investigation, trial, and sentencing, but she has claimed from the outset that her actions were heroic and justified. Peters has become a darling of the election conspiracy theory movement, feted at gatherings across the country including Mar-a-Lago itself. Her costly legal defense was funded by high-profile election deniers like “MyPillow Guy” Mike Lindell and Patrick “Piano Wire” Byrne. At her sentencing, rather than showing the remorse that might have reduced her prison sentence, Peters chose to bicker with the judge about her true innocence.

As Raw Story reports, after years of celebrity martyrdom, Peters is now showing right on cue what her lawyers are calling remorse.

“We can’t reveal what Tina’s true feelings are about her actions and why she did what she did and what part of that she regrets because she could have made a different decision,” her attorney, John Case, said on conservative talk radio. “But yeah, she, of course, anyone has second thoughts about what they’ve done – and in that respect has remorse.”

For years, Peters and her supporters have maintained she did nothing wrong and portrayed her as a “political prisoner.”

The apparent change in tone comes as Colorado’s Democratic Gov. Jared Polis considers whether to grant Peters clemency. Polis said last week that Peters would need to show “contrition and apologize for her actions” if he is going to commute her sentence.

The timing of this would-be change of heart wasn’t lost on 9NEWS’ Kyle Clark:

CLARK: This morning on the radio, Peter’s attorney John Case went on to say that while Peters has remorse, he believes that she is a martyr for the stolen elections cause and that she’s really being held in prison as a scapegoat to cover up the election crimes they claim have been committed by Democratic Attorney General Phil Weiser and Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold.

As of this writing there has been no public response from the governor’s office to the claim that Peters is showing some undisclosed degree of remorse, for some aspect of her crime that does not based on these comments include her actual motive. It has been suggested that Gov. Polis has already largely made up his mind to commute Peters’ sentence, and the stipulation for her to show remorse only came after the intense pushback. But this mealy-mouthed statement of “regret” in the abstract, while continuing to claim Peters is a “martyr for the stolen elections cause,” makes it obvious that Peters has no intention of showing authentic remorse for what she did. If Peters didn’t trust the election equipment it was her sworn duty to protect, there were plenty of ways to address that concern without hatching an identity theft scheme to allow outsiders to evade security measures and access the machines.

In short, Tina Peters has not met the standard set by Gov. Polis. She cannot without losing everything that made her a celebrity.

Gov. Polis is a smart man. He understands all of this.

The only question now is whether he would rather be fooled.