Colorado attorney general says Tina Peters’ First Amendment appeals claims are wrong

The Colorado Attorney General’s office has formally responded to claims from former Republican Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters that the state court is trying to keep her from speaking out on election security, in violation of her First Amendment rights, and has unjustly denied her bond while she appeals her conviction on charges related to handling election equipment.

Peters is currently incarcerated at the La Vista Correctional Facility, a medium-security facility for women located in Pueblo. In 2024, a state judge in Grand Junction sentenced Peters to nine years in prison when she was found guilty of several felony charges stemming from her efforts to help a man gain unauthorized access to Mesa County’s Dominion voting machines in 2021.

Peters has filed a federal habeas corpus petition and argues that the judge who oversaw the case, Matthew Barrett, denied her bail to silence her, violating her constitutionally protected right to free speech.

“We have a person in prison because of a fear that she's a danger to society because of what she might say,” said Peters’ attorney Peter Ticktin during an earlier hearing on the case. Ticktin is a constitutional lawyer based in Florida who helped lobby for pardons for participants in the Jan. 6 attack, including Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes.

In a legal filing this week, Colorado’s Attorney General Phil Weiser said the state court denied bail for Peters because the court found she was a flight risk and a danger to the community: “The question is not whether the state-court decision was correct, but whether it was ‘objectively unreasonable.’”

Weiser said in the federal habeas case, the role of the federal court is to assess the reasonableness of the state court’s decision and nothing more. 

“Under this standard, habeas relief is warranted ‘only if all ‘fairminded jurists’ would agree that the state court got it wrong,” states the written legal response.

The Colorado Court of Appeals previously denied Tina Peters' request for a bond on appeal. The attorney general said there is no clearly established Supreme Court standard for her claim that the appeal bond was denied based on any of her protected speech. 

During her sentencing last year in Grand Junction, Judge Barrett strongly rebuked Peters with a blistering critique of her actions and attitude and said she was an attention-seeking former official who only thinks about herself. 

“You are no hero,” Barrett told Peters. “You're a charlatan who used, and is still using, your prior position in office to peddle a snake oil that's been proven to be junk time and time again.”

He said she was continuing to push false claims about rigged voting machines and a stolen election. 

Weiser said the court made those statements in the context of the sentencing hearing after Peters laid out her claims of election fraud.

Matt Slocum/AP

“The court’s decision was based on its determination that Ms. Peters used her position as an elected official to promote the allegations and fuel controversy about the reliability of elections in a quest for fame and power, and that Ms.Peters used the allegations as a justification for her criminal conduct. Thus, whether the allegations were lies was immaterial to the court’s ruling,” the attorney general’s filing states.

The state also objects to an amicus brief from Peters’ supporters, and said they don’t “sufficiently articulate a special interest or present a unique perspective that would assist this Court.” The state also filed a motion to strike the testimony of a confidential witness that Peters submitted.

Peters continues to argue she did nothing wrong when she helped an unauthorized person use someone else’s identity to access her office’s election equipment and attend a secure software update in search of voter fraud. 

She remains a cause célèbre for those on the right who believe election equipment makers conspired with Democrats to sway elections — claims that have never been upheld in any court or substantiated by any audit of election results.

President Donald Trump has also lobbied on her behalf and directed the U.S. Department of Justice to help secure Peters’ release, referring to her as a “hostage” that was “being held in a Colorado prison by the Democrats, for political reasons.”