The two men most likely to replace Gov. Jared Polis next year have been clear: They do not think former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters should be let out of prison early.
When asked during a recent Democratic primary debate whether Peters’ nine-year sentence for orchestrating a security breach of her county’s election system in 2021 was too harsh, Attorney General Phil Weiser, whose office helped prosecute Peters, said “no way.”
“No,” said U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet.
Peters, whose sentence was cut in half Friday by Polis, has become a central figure in Colorado’s 2026 gubernatorial race. While both Democrats running to be Colorado’s next governor have said she deserves to remain behind bars, two of the three Republicans in the race have said she should be let out immediately.
“When I’m governor, if this isn’t taken care of, Day 1 she is being set free,” said pastor Victor Marx, a Republican gubernatorial candidate. “I’ll open the jail cell myself.”
It’s not the first time someone in a state prison has become a key figure in a Colorado gubernatorial race.
In 2014, when then-Gov. John Hickenlooper was running for a second term, the Democrat suggested in a passing remark to a journalist that he might commute Nathan Dunlap’s death penalty sentence if he lost his reelection bid.
Dunlap was 19 years old in 1993 when he shot five people, four of them fatally, at a Chuck E. Cheese in Aurora. Dunlap had been fired from the restaurant a few months before the shooting, which was an act of revenge.
Hickenlooper had given Dunlap an indefinite reprieve from capital punishment about three months before he was set to die. The incumbent governor’s Republican challengers in 2014 made Dunlap part of their platform, vowing to execute him if they were elected to the state’s highest office.
“When I’m governor, Nathan Dunlap will be executed,” Republican Bob Beauprez said at a debate.
Hickenlooper’s off-the-cuff comment that he was considering commutation went public when a recording made by one of his staffers was released through an open records request. The issue became a central part of the governor’s race that year.
Ultimately, Hickenlooper won and his reprieve for Dunlap stayed in place until 2020, when Polis signed a bill repealing the death penalty in Colorado and converting the sentences of Colorado’s three death row inmates — including Dunlap — to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Polis, in an interview Friday with The Colorado Sun, said how his successor might approach Peters’ case didn’t factor into his decision to reduce her sentence.
“I really did not think about what other governors might do,” he said.
But it has been on his mind when making other clemency decisions.
“There’s certainly people that I deny with the thought that, ‘Oh, maybe they’ll come back (and) the future governor will feel differently,’” Polis said. “But because these actions are decisive and constitutional, they’re really just based on what’s in front of me.”