The county clerk condemned to nearly a decade in jail for spreading conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election claims she was forced into solitary confinement in Colorado after complaining about how corrections personnel treated her.
Tina Peters, as previously reported by Law&Crime, was convicted in August 2024 of engaging in a security breach involving unauthorized access to voting equipment while serving as a county clerk in Mesa County.
According to prosecutors, Peters and her deputy clerk, Belinda Knisley, engaged in election equipment tampering and official misconduct in 2021 when they let an unauthorized third party to make copies of voting machine hard drives. They collaborated to accomplish this prior to and following a “trusted build” systems update in May 2021.
Both Peters and Knisely consistently asserted that President Donald Trump won the 2020 election against Joe Biden and that the voting machines were manipulated to give Biden the victory.
In October 2024, following a protracted hearing in which Peters continually displayed disobedience and held to her views, she was sentenced to nine years in state prison for her felony convictions.
Peters’ lawyer now claims her health is “deteriorating markedly,” particularly since being placed in solitary confinement, according to local Fox affiliate KDVR.
According to court documents published by KDVR, Peters filed a grievance against a prison officer after she requested that he not discuss her case during a GED class. According to the investigation, another inmate screamed at Peters when she requested that her case not be discussed, and the inmate allegedly followed her to her unit while cursing at her.
A handwritten paper Peters handed to her counsel apparently mentions the written grievance against the officer as the primary reason for her solitary incarceration.
Peters’ lawyer also claims that her client suffers from a cough, chronic pain in her neck, back, and hips, sleep deprivation, cognitive deterioration, and a possible recurrence of lung cancer, according to KDVR. She has requested that Peters be released immediately.
The Trump administration has expressed an interest in Peters’ incarceration, which Colorado prosecutors have described as a “wholly inappropriate” and “grotesque” attempt to “weaponize the rule of law.”
Earlier this month, the Federal Bureau of Prisons requested that Colorado officials transfer Peters into federal custody.
