July 15, 2024 02:35 PM UTC

Tina Peters (Finally) Dons Ankle Bracelet As Day Of Reckoning Nears

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• by: Colorado Pols

As Charles Ashby reports for the Grand Junction Sentinel, the endless delay tactics from indicted former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters to avoid sanction in the pileup of legal cases against her have finally run out of steam, with Peters’ trial on felony counts stemming from her misuse of office to allow the theft of election equipment in a fruitless attempt to provide evidence that the 2020 presidential election was improperly conducted now just days away. Peters’ attempts to stave off a sentence she received for obstruction after illegally recording court proceedings, handed down in April of 2023, have at length failed–and Peters is now on in-home detention, with her July 30th trial date fast approaching:

In May, District Judge Gretchen Larson affirmed her conviction, and Mesa County District Attorney Dan Rubinstein filed a motion to lift that stay and begin her home detention, which began earlier this week.

“The defendant’s sentence has been stayed for more than a year and four months,” Rubinstein wrote in a reply brief to Peters’ request to continue the stay indefinitely.

“The defense now asks that the stay continue, citing no legal authority, merely a plea to the court that the defendant is better able to assist in her defense if the stay remains,” he added. “The defense cites no examples of how or why this is true. The defendant’s attorneys do not live in Mesa County. There is no prohibition on her meeting with them via Zoom or other platforms, which she routinely is seen on podcasts utilizing.”

The only thing that Peters has fought harder than having to serve the sentence for her relatively minor obstruction charge has been her increasingly desperate attempts to delay the start of the felony criminal trial that could hypothetically put Peters in prison for the rest of her natural life. After every legal means of slow-walking the case failed, Peters resorted to firing her attorneys at the last possible moment in February of this year in order to force another delay while her new legal team gets up to speed. With Peters’ own subordinates lined up to testify against her and Peters’ baseless insistence that she was a whistleblower for a wronged Donald Trump carrying zero weight in a court of law, we have no idea what her defense is going to consist of.

All we can hope for, in all seriousness and with as much compassion as the situation warrants, is that perhaps it’s not too late for Peters to make a plea deal. Trump is not coming to save Peters, and he couldn’t get her out of these state charges even as President. For the sake of this septuagenarian Gold Star Mom on general principles, we hope she sees reason before drawing a harsher penalty that could have been avoided.