• Former Mesa County, Colorado, clerk Tina Peters was sentenced to nine years in prison for crimes related to a breach of her county’s voting system.
  • Peters espoused the false conspiracy theory that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden due to ballot fraud.
  • She was accused of allowing access to the voting system to an expert affiliated with My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell, a leading proponent of the Trump election conspiracy theory.

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  • vortic
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    2 months ago

    It was actually pretty interesting to listen to the sentencing. It’s about 20 minutes. The judge goes through all of the options at his disposal and discusses his the rationale that he used to arrive at a prison sentence.

    He had the option of sentencing her to parole, community service, or incarceration. He then described her as unrepentant, the most defiant defendant the court has ever seen, and a continuing danger to society. He also discussed that he considers how a sentence will act as deterrent for the defendant directly (not at all in this case) and for others who might seek to commit similar crimes as well as punishment. He determined that Mrs Peters would immediately go commit the same crimes again given the opportunity, that community deterrence is important, and that punishment was warranted.

    He also went through her mitigating circumstances. He compared her circumstances to the typical defendant that his court sees and characterized her as extremely privileged with few mitigating circumstances and many aggravating ones. He said that she simply sought power, prestige, and wealth without a care for who she harmed. He characterized her as an unrepentant liar and a fraud who lied every chance she got including about why she kicked a police officer while on video.

    Based on his rationale, he decided that removing Tina Peter’s from the community was in the best interests of the community.

    TL/DR The judge didn’t like Mrs Peters very much.