By Janelle Powell, Opinion Contributor
There comes a moment when a government stops even pretending to be fair or constitutional. What the State of Colorado is doing to Tina Peters – a grandmother, a whistleblower, and a Gold Star Mother of a fallen Navy SEAL – is exactly that moment.
And if you’re not outraged, you’re not awake.
This is not justice. This is not law.
This is a political hit job.
Tina Peters is not in prison because she’s violent or corrupt. She is in prison because she preserved election records. She didn’t destroy evidence – she safeguarded it. She didn’t cover up wrongdoing – she documented it. And for that, Colorado prosecutors hammered her with seven felonies and five misdemeanors.
Before Tina ever blew the whistle in Mesa County, Rudy Giuliani was exposing election concerns on the national stage. Right after the 2020 election, he traveled to Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia and Arizona to present sworn affidavits from regular Americans who risked everything to report irregularities.
Instead of investigating, the political establishment tried to destroy him. And Tina walked straight into the same fire at the local level.
Her treatment has been nothing short of brutal. Tina Peters was thrown into solitary confinement for filing a grievance – nothing more. A prison teacher had been walking around telling inmates that Tina would “never leave prison” and that “the state will make sure she dies here.”
When Tina calmly asked about the remarks, inmates turned hostile. She did the only thing she could: she filed a grievance, exactly as policy required. The state retaliated instantly. She was strip-searched, dragged through medical and mental evaluations, interrogated, and thrown into solitary confinement for up to 17 days.
All of this on the eve of her mother’s 97th birthday.
To understand the cruelty of this, it helps to remember where solitary confinement began. In the early 1800s, Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary used isolation as a Quaker experiment in reflection and repentance. But even then, doctors warned it caused hallucinations, mental collapse, and permanent psychological damage. Solitary was supposed to be rare, temporary, and reserved for violent inmates.
Today, Colorado uses it as a weapon – to intimidate, silence, and psychologically break a whistleblower.
The double standard is staggering. A violent repeat offender named Lawrence Reed was arrested 49 times and served just 900 days behind bars. Yet Tina Peters – a nonviolent grandmother and Gold Star Mother – received eight years and is now being subjected to solitary confinement.
This is not justice. This is targeted retaliation.
States cannot gag witnesses. They cannot obstruct federal investigations. Yet Colorado did exactly that in Tina’s case – and then punished her when she resisted. Attorneys across the country have said they’ve never seen anything like her trial. Tina was barred from presenting key evidence. Witnesses who spent months investigating were kept off the stand. The judge restricted testimony to trivialities instead of the truth.
If this can happen to her, it can happen to anyone.
When the government punishes a whistleblower harder than a violent criminal…
When it isolates her… silences her… blocks her evidence…
Retaliates for grievances…
And throws her into solitary confinement to break her…
That is political imprisonment.
And her name is Tina Peters.
Pray for her. Pray for her strength. Pray that she gets to see her mother again.
Because if they can do this to her – a Gold Star Mother – they can do it to anyone.
