(Luis Cornelio, Headline USA) The two Colorado officials who attempted to block the long-awaited commutation of Tina Peters are no longer serving on the state’s clemency board.
Gov. Jared Polis removed Hannah Seigel Proff and Azra Taslimi after they publicly and privately challenged his decision to commute Peters’s sentence.
According to Polis, the pair violated the board’s confidentiality rules by publicly disclosing its internal deliberations and recommendations regarding clemency petitions.
In Colorado, the pardon power is held by the governor, not unelected bureaucrats.
Polis announced their removals in letters first reported by The New York Times.
“You breached the required duty of confidentiality by publicly divulging board members’ votes,” Polis wrote to Proff and Taslimi.
Polis spokesman Eric Maruyama said the women’s public campaign “threatens the credibility of the board, colors future deliberations by the board, and breaks clearly stated confidentiality policy.”
Taslimi pushed back on the governor’s explanation in defiant remarks.
“He’s saying the public doesn’t have the right to know his own advisory board told him no — twice,” Taslimi claimed. “He’s not protecting a process. He’s protecting himself from scrutiny.”
She added, “We spoke up about this because it shows the process punishes people without power, and protects the people with it. Speaking out has a cost, and here we are.”
The dispute first became public when Proff and Taslimi told The New York Times that the board had twice voted against recommending clemency for Peters.
The two later intensified their criticism by co-authoring an opinion piece in The Denver Post that disclosed the board’s deliberations regarding Peters’s commutation.
Peters was sentenced to nine years in prison in connection with a 2021 election system security breach while serving as Mesa County clerk. She has long maintained that she was conducting an investigation that uncovered major security flaws in Colorado’s voting systems.
The Colorado Court of Appeals later vacated Peters’s sentence, ruling that the sentencing judge improperly relied on her constitutionally protected political beliefs when determining her punishment.
Polis commuted Peters’s sentence on June 1.
