Yesterday, a great evil came to an end as former Colorado election official Tina Peters was finally freed from prison. Like so many Americans who have been targeted in the last decade by biased prosecutors, Peters never belonged there in the first place. Peters was railroaded at the insistence of election officials in Colorado who were trying to punish her for her investigation of the compromised 2020 presidential election. Singled out as she was for exemplary punishment, Peters was subjected to abusive conditions and periodic assaults by fellow prisoners. All of this was for following her conscience as county clerk and recorder of Mesa County, Colorado, in acting to prevent and detect election fraud.
Concerned (correctly) that there was evidence of fraud in the 2020 presidential race in her county, she made copies of voting data before it could be destroyed—an act that Colorado authorities convinced a biased judge was criminal. Although her political enemies clearly hoped that she wouldn’t outlive her long, outrageous sentence, it was recently and mercifully commuted by Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, thanks in part to pressure brought on them by the Trump administration.
Peters’ full story deserves to be made into a movie about the corruption of justice in our country.
But another film, unjustly forgotten, tells a remarkably similar tale: 1991’s Prisoner of Honor, directed by Ken Russell and starring Richard Dreyfuss. The film depicts the persecution, imprisonment, rigged trials, and final vindication of French Army Captain Alfred Dreyfus—commonly known as the Dreyfus Affair. The American actor (no relation to the film’s subject) doesn’t portray the Jewish captain, but the Catholic Col. Georges Picquart, who defied orders and became Dreyfus’ champion.
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