With luck, we’ll know Tuesday night who our next governor will be. History tells us the winner of the Bennet-Weiser Dem primary is pretty much a lock. There has been only one Republican governor in Colorado over the past 50 years, and if Victor Marx wins the GOP primary — can he really be the favorite? — it could set the party back another 50 years.
But what we know for sure is that come next January, Jared Polis, who is term limited, will no longer be governor.
And I think I could predict the same even if he weren’t term limited.
As I’ve mentioned often enough, Polis wrote his political obituary when he granted clemency to election grifter Tina Peters, freeing her from prison on June 1 even as her sentencing was being reconsidered by order of the Colorado Court of Appeals.
Everyone has a theory as to why Polis has made himself a pariah in his own party, but if you read the recent Denver Post op-ed written by two members of Polis’ 11-person clemency advisory board, it gives you a good idea how they see it.
And it’s not pretty.
Two longtime board members, both appointed by Polis, both Denver lawyers who have been public defenders, fault Polis for, among other things, stepping all over the judicial system, ruling for the powerful and well connected and fast-tracking Peters’ commutation in a system that often takes years to proceed.
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As Azra Taslimi and Hanna Seigel Proff wrote, “Tina Peters’ clemency is the two-tiered system operating exactly as it always has, rewarding proximity to power, and leaving everyone else to absorb the cost.”
And they’re not alone.
Twice, the governor sent Peters’ application to the 11-person clemency board he had appointed. Twice, the board said no.
Both times unanimously.
“The governor granted her asylum anyway,” Taslimi and Proff wrote. “The problem is not about Tina Peters’ case in isolation. It is what his decision reveals. That the system bends for some and holds firm against everyone else.”
You don’t often hear from members of the clemency advisory board, and there’s good reason. Not only are their meetings held in secret, but the board members don’t even take notes and they rarely publicly discuss their recommendations to the governor.
Why did Taslimi and Proff break the code of silence?
Before writing the op-ed, they had gone public for an article in the New York Times, with Proff saying of Peters’ commutation, “It really was a punch in the gut. It flies in the face of justice.”
Proff added: “Some of these applications bring us to tears. Ms. Peters’s application just felt empty.”
In the op-ed, they wrote that Peters’ applications were “performative,” probably written by her lawyers, and did not show any kind of real remorse. They said it was the kind of application for clemency that they routinely deny “because performative accountability does not warrant mercy under our set criteria.”
Of course, the board is just advisory. Polis often rejects their findings. It’s his right. But in this case, Taslimi and Proff thought the public needed to understand the context of his actions.
A clemency hearing is a hearing of last resort. Most applicants, unlike Peters, have gone through all their appeals. Many of the applicants the board approves, unlike Peters, have made real changes in their lives and have passed the are-you-more-than-the-worst-decision-you’ve-ever-made test.
“Clemency is not a shortcut. It is what remains when every door has already closed,” they wrote in the op-ed.
And clemency is what remains when lawyers are often no longer available. When applications are handwritten from the inmates’ cells. When they may not hear anything about their applications for years. When they are not able to question why the appeal went against them.
Taslimi and Proff want you to know who the people left behind are.
“It would be dishonest to tell this story without saying plainly what it reflects,” they wrote. “The people in our queue are not a random sample of Colorado. They reflect what decades of unequal justice have built. Hispanic Coloradans make up roughly 21% of the state’s population, but over 32% of its male prison population. Black Coloradans make up just 4.5% of the state’s population, but 18% of its male prison population.
“Empirical data show that people of color are treated more harshly than their white counterparts at every stage, the harm compounding at every turn. They arrive at our table having already lost so much, asking with whatever dignity they have left for one act of grace from a system that has shown them very little.”
They added that consistency in how clemency is awarded is what makes the process “defensible.”
Yet, the Peters case, they wrote, “broke quickly and dramatically, for the benefit of Tina Peters. It is with all of those people in mind that we say what happened here was wrong.”
We know Peters proved the board right and Polis wrong. She had absolutely no remorse for her voting machine tampering. On her first day out of prison, she went on Steve Bannon’s podcast to say she had been convicted for being a, uh, truth-teller, that she was the victim, that the vote rigging was real, that the Democrats cheated in the 2020 election and that she is still appealing her sentence.
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I don’t know if Polis caved to Trump, who pushed for her release by constantly punishing Colorado while calling Polis “weak” and worse. I’ve been told that Polis wanted to grant her clemency, as a first-time, non-violent offender, as soon as the sentence was set. He somehow believes, then and now, that the 9-year sentence was too heavy, but his advisors warned him a commutation would be a political disaster.
Sometimes the advisers get it right. But Polis argues that his clemency decision was not political, but made in proud defense of the First Amendment. He even invoked — all humility way aside — the ACLU’s defense of the would-be neo-Nazi marchers in Skokie, Illinois, to defend his overwhelmingly unpopular decision.
In any case, Trump is still out there in support of Peters. In a Truth Social post — as noted by John Hickenlooper in a campaign email — Trump recently asked the MAGA cultists who read his social media well of disinformation whether he should “clear her name and compensate her” for her time spent, in Trump’s words, as a political prisoner.
I think we can safely predict the result of Trump’s entirely unscientific poll. And we can predict this, too — there won’t need to be any rigging for MAGA voters to get to “yes.”
Just as there was no rigging needed for the Colorado clemency board to unanimously get to “no.”
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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