A Colorado appeals court just ruled that former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters was sentenced improperly — because the judge who threw the book at her factored in her “continued promotion of election fraud claims” when deciding how long she should sit in prison. Three appellate judges, in a unanimous 78-page opinion, said what we’ve been saying all along: you can convict someone for what they did, but you can’t add years to their sentence for what they believe.
Pop the champagne. Or at least crack open a LaCroix. We’ll take the win.
Peters was convicted in 2024 for sneaking an outside computer expert into her county’s election system during a software update in 2021. The expert was affiliated with MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. She was looking for evidence of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election. The jury convicted her, and the trial judge sentenced her to nine years in prison.
Nine years. For a county clerk who copied a hard drive.
The Colorado Court of Appeals upheld the conviction. Peters did what she did, and the court said that’s a crime under state law. They also rejected her attorney’s argument that she was “defending a federal interest,” and noted that Trump’s pardon has “no impact” on the state case.
But the sentence? That’s where the court drew the line.
The appeals court found that Peters’ nine-year sentence was “based in part on improper consideration of her exercise of her right to free speech.” The sentencing judge didn’t just punish Peters for the computer breach. He punished her for continuing to talk about election fraud after the trial. The appeals court wrote that “the trial court’s comments about Peters’ belief in the existence of 2020 election fraud went beyond relevant considerations for her sentencing.”
In plain English: the judge thought her opinions were wrong and added prison time because she wouldn’t shut up about them.
The appellate judges put it perfectly: “Her offense was not her belief, however misguided the trial court deemed it to be, in the existence of such election fraud; it was her deceitful actions in her attempt to gather evidence of such fraud.”
That’s the whole ballgame. Convict her for what she did. Fine. But you don’t get to add years because she kept saying things the judge didn’t like. That’s not justice. That’s political sentencing.
The case now goes back to a lower court for resentencing. The new sentence cannot factor in Peters’ public statements about election fraud. Meaning a judge has to look at the actual crime — copying election software — and sentence her based on that alone, without piling on punishment for her First Amendment activity.
Nobody knows what the new sentence will be. But nine years was always absurd for a non-violent records offense by a county clerk, and everyone paying attention knew it. The original sentencing had the flavor of a judge making an example out of someone — punishing the movement, not just the person.
This ruling doesn’t free Tina Peters. It doesn’t vindicate her claims about 2020. But it does something just as important: it tells every judge in Colorado that you cannot sentence American citizens based on their political speech. Believe what you want about election fraud. That belief — right, wrong, or somewhere in between — is not a sentencing factor.
The First Amendment won today. And a 78-page opinion made sure every judge in the state knows it.