'Please Do What Is Right': Native American Lawmakers Urge Biden To Free Leonard Peltier

The ailing Indigenous rights activist, who is 77, "deserves to live his final years among his people," say dozens of Native state legislators.


Jennifer Bendery
02/01/2022 
Leaders of the National Caucus of Native American State Legislators wrote to President Joe Biden on Monday urging him to release Leonard Peltier from prison, warning that the 77-year-old Indigenous rights activist is in poor health and deserves ”to live his final years among his people in dignity.”

“Mr. President, please do what is right,” reads the message from New Mexico state Sen. Benny Shendo (D) and North Dakota state Rep. Ruth Buffalo (D), the chair and vice-chair of the caucus, respectively. The caucus represents 89 Native American state legislators from 21 states.

“Amid our country’s racial reckoning after George Floyd’s murder, Native Americans have not yet been included in any promise of federal justice reform. Your clemency towards Mr. Peltier would change that,” Shendo and Buffalo wrote. “His expected release would sound as a promise to the first peoples of these lands that we too enjoy America’s promise of justice for all.”

“Our communities have suffered enough,” they added. “Please prioritize equity.”

Peltier has been in prison for 45 years without any evidence that he committed a crime. The FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office charged him with the 1975 murders of two FBI agents during a shootout on a Native American reservation ― something Peltier has long said he didn’t do, even when taking responsibility for the killings could have meant parole for him. His trial was riddled with misconduct, and even the U.S. attorney who helped put Peltier in prison decades ago is now pleading with Biden to grant him clemency because, he says, federal officials never had evidence that he committed a crime.

On Friday, Peltier tested positive for COVID-19. He is currently in quarantine.

His COVID status has only intensified the calls from supporters and elected officials to let him go home. Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, last week urged Biden to commute Peltier’s sentence given his age, illness and time served. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the former longtime chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the longest-serving member of the Senate, has also called on Biden to send Peltier home.

Actor Danny DeVito on Monday joined the calls for Peltier’s release.

“President Joe Biden. Please let Leonard Pleltier [sic] go. You can do it man. Pick up that pen,” he tweeted.

President Joe Biden. Please let Leonard Pleltier go. You can do it man. Pick up that pen.— Danny DeVito (@DannyDeVito) January 31, 2022

Peltier told HuffPost last week that his prison facility’s prolonged COVID-19 lockdowns, and its failure to provide booster shots to inmates, have left him ― and likely others ― unbearably isolated and preparing for death. He is particularly vulnerable to COVID’s effects given his existing serious health problems, including diabetes and an abdominal aortic aneurysm.

“I’m in hell,” he said, days before his COVID diagnosis. “Left alone and without attention is like a torture chamber for the sick and old.”

Buffalo said Tuesday that members of her caucus “understand fully the sense of urgency” in protecting elderly loved ones from COVID, particularly if they are in prison. Native Americans are more than twice as likely to die from COVID as white Americans, per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and are incarcerated at a much higher rate than the national average.

“Add inhumane living conditions, and prison guards who don’t follow CDC guidelines, [and] it is a recipe for disaster,” Buffalo told HuffPost. “Even if Mr. Peltier had not been convicted under contested circumstances, his advanced age, ill health and the amount of time he’s served ought to be enough to reconsider his circumstances. We are beyond the stage of making an example, and sheer human compassion and clemency urgently needs to be considered.”

Here’s a copy of the letter to Biden from the National Caucus of Native American State Legislators:           61f99a49e4b0b69cfe86ed26.pdf (google.com)

A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Leonard Peltier Is America's Longest-Serving Political Prisoner. Biden Is Likely His Last Hope.

Leonard Peltier Tests Positive For COVID-19

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BREAKING NEWS: Leonard Peltier Tests Positive for Covid-19



Free Leonard Peltier sign at Standing Rock camp in Dec. 2016.

 (Photo/Levi Rickert)

BY LEVI RICKERT JANUARY 29, 2022

American Indian activist Leonard Peltier (Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians), has tested positive for COVID-19 at the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex in Florida. Peltier is 77-years-old.

“Today, Leonard tested positive for COVID,” Peltier’s attorney Kevin Sharp told HuffPost late Friday. “We are all very concerned, as is Leonard. He wanted people to know that he sends his love and appreciation for the years everyone has fought for him."

According to the HuffPost article, Peltier has not received his vaccination booster shot.

Peltier’s health has long been a concern for those seeking his release from prison for his conviction of killing two FBI agents at Oglala on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1975. He suffers from heart problems and diabetes.

Supporters believe that Peltier was wrongfully convicted in 1977 for a crime he did not commit. Imprisoned for more than 46 years, Peltier has the support of Amnesty International, and other human rights organizations. Over the years, some 50 members of Congress and others — including Judge Gerald Heaney (8th Circuit Court of Appeals) who sat as a member of the court in two of Peltier’s appeals — have called for his immediate release.

Peltier's COVID-19 diagnosis comes just two days after the chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawai‘i), sent a letter to President Joe Biden that urged the president to commute the Peltier's sentence.

Leonard Peltier (Photo/Courtesy

Schatz cites Peltier’s advanced age, illness, and a loophole in current laws that unfairly disqualifies Peltier from compassionate release. While legislation led by Schatz to fix the loophole continues to be considered in Congress, that process can take years – time Peltier may not have.

“I commend your administration’s commitment to righting past wrongs in our criminal justice system. In continuing that work as you consider recommendations for individuals to receive clemency, I write to urge you to grant a commutation of Leonard Peltier’s sentence. Mr. Peltier meets appropriate criteria for commutation: (1) his old age and critical illness, (2) the amount of time he has already served, and (3) the unavailability of other remedies. Given these factors, Mr. Peltier should be granted a commutation of his sentence,” Chairman Schatz wrote in his letter to President Biden. “Mr. Peltier has consistently maintained his innocence because the facts of his case, as well as the actions of federal agents and prosecutors involved, raise serious questions about whether he received a fair trial.”

During the daily White House press briefing on Thursday a reporter asked Press Secretary Jen Psaki about Sen. Schatz's letter in the following exchange:

"REPORTER: Yesterday, Senator Schatz, who chairs the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, wrote to the President, asking him to commute the sentence of Leonard Peltier, a Native American activist who was convicted of murder in a very controversial trial about four decades ago. Is that something the President is considering or taking a look at, at this time?

MS. PSAKI: I don’t have anything to predict for you on that front."

Editor's Note: This is a developing story that will be updated as more news becomes available.

President Biden: Enough is Enough, Free Leonard Peltier

BY LEVI RICKERT 

 

JANUARY 30, 2022

The long and sad imprisonment of Leonard Peltier (Turtle Mountain Chippewa Nation) took on a new complication on Friday when it was reported he tested positive for COVID-19 while incarcerated at the United States Penitentiary at Coleman, Fla. (USP Coleman 1).

Prison is not a great place to have COVID-19, especially if you are a 77-year-old man with comorbidities that include diabetes, hypertension, a heart condition and acute aneurysm, such as Peltier.

The Prison Policy Initiative reported in October 2021 that the COVID-19 death rate in prisons is more than double that of the general U.S. population, as calculated by the UCLA COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project

Peltier has been incarcerated for 46 years for the killing of two FBI agents at Oglala on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota in 1975.

To many American Indians, Peltier is a symbol of an oppressive federal system that relegates Native people to apartheid and neglect. He is a political prisoner that we may only think about if we happen to see a bumper sticker on the back of a vehicle that reads “FREE Leonard Peltier.”

The International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee (ILPDC) on Saturday afternoon distributed a news release saying the federal prisons acted recklessly in regard to Peltier’s care. Peltier has yet to receive a COVID-19 booster shot, 11 months after his last vaccination.

The ILPDC noted in its news release that visitors to USP Coleman 1 have observed that the facility is not mandating vaccines for guards or staff. Guards and staff have been seen improperly wearing masks or not wearing them at all. Social distancing was not encouraged or enforced and booster shots had not, until recently, been available to any inmate at USP Coleman 1.

Soon after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, then U.S. Attorney General William Barr issued U.S. Department of Justice guidelines for COVID Release to Home Confinement for inmates who were elderly or with compromised immune system or co-morbidities on March 26 and again, April 3, 2020.

Peltier’s age and comorbidities unequivocally make him eligible for home release under Department of Justice guidelines. Peltier’s tribal community on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation in North Dakota has repeatedly expressed willingness to ensure he is provided adequate housing there.

Senate Committee on Indian Affairs Chairman Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawai‘i), sent a letter to President Joe Biden last Wednesday urging him to commute Peltier's sentence. 

“I commend your administration’s commitment to righting past wrongs in our criminal justice system. In continuing that work as you consider recommendations for individuals to receive clemency, I write to urge you to grant a commutation of Leonard Peltier’s sentence. Mr. Peltier meets appropriate criteria for commutation: (1) his old age and critical illness, (2) the amount of time he has served, and (3) the unavailability of other remedies. Given these factors, Mr. Peltier should be granted a commutation of his sentence,” Chairman Schatz wrote.

Leonard Peltier (Photo/Courtesy)

Beyond Peltier’s current battle with COVID-19, the White House needs to review Peltier’s 1977 case, in which two of his co-defendants were acquitted on the basis of self-defense against the FBI.

Peltier was tried separately from his co-defendants.

According to Kevin Sharp, former Chief Judge for the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, who Peltier’s current attorney, Peltier’s trial was replete with prosecutorial misconduct, falsified testimony and fabricated evidence. Even the autopsy presented to the jury was done by an examiner who had never seen the bodies of the two agents.

The former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Iowa, James H. Reynolds, who supervised the post-trial sentencing and appeals, admitted they “shaved a few corners” and “we could not prove Leonard Peltier personally committed any crime on the Pine Ridge Reservation” said in a letter to President Biden last year.

Reynolds wrote “enough is enough.”

On behalf of all Indigenous people in the U.S. and across the globe, enough is enough. We call on President Biden to commute the sentence of Leonard Peltier.

FREE PELTIER!

U$ POITICAL PRISONER

What to know about Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier’s first hearing in more than a decade


American Indian activist Leonard Peltier speaks during an interview at the U.S. Penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kan., April 29, 1999. Peltier, who has spent most of his life in prison in the 1975 killings of two FBI agents in South Dakota, has a parole hearing Monday, June 10, 2024, at a federal prison in Florida. (Joe Ledford/The Kansas City Star via AP, File)

An unidentified FBI agent, one of the nearly 500 current and retired FBI agents protesting clemency for Leonard Peltier, marches toward the White House, Friday, Dec. 15, 2000, holding an image of two FBI agents, Ron Williams and Jack Coler, who were killed on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation in South Dakota in 1975. Peltier, who has spent most of his life in prison for the killings, has a parole hearing Monday, June 10, 2024, at a federal prison in Florida. (AP Photo/Hillery Smith Garrison, File)

BY HEATHER HOLLINGSWORTH AND JACK DURA
 June 9, 2024

Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier, who has spent most of his life in prison since his conviction in the 1975 killings of two FBI agents in South Dakota, has a parole hearing Monday at a federal prison in Florida.

At 79, his health is failing, and if this parole request is denied, it might be a decade or more before it is considered again, said his attorney Kevin Sharp, a former federal judge. Sharp and other supporters have long argued that Peltier was wrongly convicted and say now that this effort may be his last chance at freedom.

“This whole entire hearing is a battle for his life,” said Nick Tilsen, president and CEO of the NDN Collective, an Indigenous-led advocacy group. “It’s time for him to come home.”

The FBI and its current and former agents dispute the claims of innocence. The fight for Peltier’s freedom, which is embroiled in the Indigenous rights movements, remains so robust nearly half a century later that “Free Peltier” T-shirts and caps are still hawked online.

“It may be kind of cultish to take his side as some kind of a hero. But he’s certainly not that; he’s a cold blooded murderer,” said Mike Clark, president of the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, in a letter arguing that Peltier should remain incarcerated.

Here are some things to know about the case.

WHAT HAPPENED IN THE ‘70S?

An enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribe, Peltier was active in the American Indian Movement, which began in the 1960s as a local organization in Minneapolis that grappled with issues of police brutality and discrimination against Native Americans. It quickly became a national force.

AIM grabbed headlines in 1973 when it took over the village of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation, leading to a 71-day standoff with federal agents. Tensions between AIM and the government remained high for years.

The FBI considered AIM an extremist organization, and planted spies and snitches in the group. Sharp blamed the government for creating what he described as a “powder keg” that exploded on June 26, 1975.


That’s the day agents came to Pine Ridge to serve arrest warrants amid ongoing battles over Native treaty rights and self-determination.

After being injured in a shootout, agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams were shot in the head at point-blank range. Also killed in the shootout was AIM member Joseph Stuntz. The Justice Department concluded that a law enforcement sniper killed Stuntz.

Two other AIM members, Robert Robideau and Dino Butler, were acquitted of killing Coler and Williams.

After fleeing to Canada and being extradited to the United States, Peltier was convicted and sentenced in 1977 to life in prison, despite defense claims that evidence against him had been falsified.

“You’ve got a conviction that was riddled with misconduct by the prosecutors, the U.S. Attorney’s office, by the FBI who investigated this case and, frankly the jury,” Sharp said. “If they tried this today, he does not get convicted.”
HOW HAS THE FBI RESPONDED?

FBI Director Chris Wray said in a statement that the agency was resolute in its opposition to Peltier’s latest application for parole.

“We must never forget or put aside that Peltier intentionally murdered these two young men and has never expressed remorse for his ruthless actions,” he wrote, adding that the case has been repeatedly upheld on appeal.

And the FBI Agents Association, a professional group that represents mostly active agents, sent a letter to the parole commission opposing parole. The group said any early release of Peltier would be a “cruel act of betrayal.”

WHAT IS THE LEGACY OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN MOVEMENT?

Tilsen, a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation, credits AIM and others for most of the rights Native Americans have today, including religious freedom, the ability to operate casinos and tribal colleges, and enter into contracts with the federal government to oversee schools and other services.

“Leonard has been a part of creating that, but he hasn’t been available to be a beneficiary because he has been incarcerated for almost 50 years,” Tilsen said. “So he hasn’t been able to enjoy the result of those wins and see how they have changed and transformed Indian country.”

WHEN IS THE HEARING?

The hearing is scheduled to start at 11 a.m. Monday at a high security lockup that is part of the Federal Correctional Complex Coleman. The Federal Bureau of Prisons said in a statement that the hearing is not open to the public.

Sharp, Peltier’s attorney, said the hearing will have witnesses for and against parole. Family members of the two FBI agents who were killed will be there.

Sharp expects the hearing to last the day. The decision is required to come within 21 days. If parole is granted, there’s a process for release which shouldn’t take long. If denied, Peltier can look at his options for filing an appeal to a federal district court, Sharp said.

Parole was rejected at Peltier’s last hearing in 2009, and then-President Barack Obama denied a clemency request in 2017. Another clemency request is pending before President Joe Biden.

Leonard Peltier, Native activist imprisoned for nearly 50 years, faces a 'last chance' parole hearing

 Native American activist and federal prisoner Leonard Peltier, who has maintained his innocence in the murders of two FBI agents almost half a century ago, is due for a full parole hearing Monday — his first in 15 years — as his supporters fear he may not get another opportunity to advocate for his release.

A lawyer for Peltier, 79, said he has been “in good spirits” as he prepares for the hearing at the Federal Correctional Complex Coleman in Florida.

“He wants to go home and he recognizes this is probably his last chance,” attorney Kevin Sharp said. “But he feels good about presenting the best case he can.”

Sharp said medical and re-entry experts would be called to support Peltier’s case for parole, and that hearing examiners and the U.S. Parole Commission will have letters from his community and prominent figures to review.

Over the decades, human rights and faith leaders, including Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama, and Nobel Peace Prize recipients such as Nelson Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu have backed Peltier’s release.

Apart from the decades of scrutiny surrounding how Peltier’s case was investigated and his trial was conducted, Sharp said, he believes his age, nonviolent record in prison and declining health, including diabetes, hypertension, partial blindness from a stroke and bouts of Covid, should be accounted for as the commission determines whether to grant parole.

The federal Bureau of Prisons “does not say he is a danger,” Sharp said. “This is about have they extracted enough retribution,” he added of the federal government’s resistance to Peltier’s previous bids for parole, given that the crime involved law enforcement agents.

At his 2009 parole hearing, an FBI official argued that time has not diminished “the brutality of the crimes,” and that while Peltier claimed his innocence, “he has resorted to lies and half-truths in order to sway public attention from the facts at hand.”

Paroling Peltier, who was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences, would have only promoted “disrespect for the law,” Justice Department officials said at the time.

FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a statement Friday that the agency "remains resolute" in its opposition to Peltier's release, citing how his appeals have been denied and that he had even escaped from a California prison in 1979 but was captured three days later.

"We must never forget or put aside that Peltier intentionally murdered these two young men and has never expressed remorse for his ruthless actions," Wray said.

The arrest

On June 26, 1975, FBI agents Jack Coler and Ron Williams were on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota to arrest a man on a federal warrant in connection with the theft of cowboy boots, according to the agency’s investigative files.

While there, the pair radioed that they had come under fire in a shootout that lasted 10 minutes, the FBI said. Both men were killed by bullets fired at close range. According to the officials, Peltier —  a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and then an activist with the American Indian Movement, a grassroots Indigenous rights group — was identified as the only person in possession of a weapon on the reservation that could fire the type of bullet that killed the agents.

But dozens of people had participated in the gunfight; at trial, two co-defendants were acquitted after they claimed self-defense. When Peltier was tried separately in 1977, no witnesses were presented who could identify him as the shooter, and unknown to his defense lawyers at the time, the federal government had withheld a ballistics report indicating the fatal bullets didn’t come from his weapon, according to court documents filed by Peltier on appeal.

But the FBI has maintained his conviction was “rightly and fairly obtained” and “has withstood numerous appeals to multiple courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Still, other officials have spoken out in support of him over the years. Retired federal prosecutor James Reynolds, who supervised Peltier’s post-trial sentencing and appeals, wrote to President Joe Biden in 2021 asking him to commute Peltier’s sentence because it would “serve the best interests of justice and the best interests of our country.”

“He has served more than 46 years on the basis of minimal evidence, a result that I strongly doubt would be upheld in any court today,” Reynolds wrote.

Peltier, in a phone interview from prison with NBC News in 2022, said he had hoped mounting pressure from Democratic members of Congress would convince Biden to grant him clemency, and possibly allow him a new trial to prove his innocence.

“I have a last few years,” Peltier said, “and I got to fight.”

Parole process

Peltier falls into a small category of mostly elderly federal prisoners who committed their offenses before November 1987 and can petition for parole from the Justice Department’s Parole Commission. Congress eliminated federal parole for inmates who committed offenses after that date because of new sentencing guidelines.

At a hearing, an examiner is in charge of reviewing the inmate’s case and hearing from witnesses. The hearing examiner’s recommendation on whether to grant parole moves to at least one other examiner who does not attend the hearing, and the ultimate decision then falls to a parole commissioner — who is nominated by the president, confirmed by the Senate and may be a former law enforcement official, educator or lawyer.

If the parole commissioner agrees with the examiners’ recommendation, that becomes the official decision. But if the first parole commissioner disagrees, a second commissioner must concur with either that commissioner or the examiners.

Such a layered process can appear detrimental to inmates if “the thread is lost,” said Charles Weisselberg, a Berkeley Law professor who has written about the “dysfunction” of the commission.

In addition, the Parole Commission typically has five members, but it has had only two since about 2018, Weisselberg said.

The Senate has not moved on filling the commission’s vacant seats. Weisselberg said having fewer commissioners to deliberate gives “greater power” to the hearing examiner, and “as a practical matter, it virtually eliminates the right to a meaningful parole appeal.”

Weisselberg has suggested the process can be streamlined with a magistrate judge as the arbiter. The Parole Commission did not return a request for comment.

Peltier’s supporters are hoping for parole but say Biden, who has not commented on the case, can still have him released on compassionate grounds.

“Mr. Peltier deserves the dignity to live the rest of his life outside the confines of a federal prison cell,” said Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., adding that “it is not too late to grant him the remaining years of a life that the federal government wrongfully stole from him so many years ago.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com

Amnestyusa.orgwww.amnestyusa.org/campaigns/free-leonard-peltier/

Campaign: President Biden Should Free Leonard Peltier

Campaign: President Biden Should Free Leonard Peltier ... Leonard Peltier, a Native American activist, has been imprisoned for nearly 50 years in the USA for a ...

Actionnetwork.orgactionnetwork.org/letters/free-leonard-peltier

Free Leonard Peltier - Action Network

Stand with us to demand justice, compassion, and the granting of clemency for Leonard Peltier. Together, we can help rectify an injustice that has lasted for .

Freeleonardpeltiernow.orgwww.freeleonardpeltiernow.org/

Free Leonard Peltier Now

is a nationwide initiative to ensure the legacy of Leonard Peltier remains in the forefront of the public eye. As an icon of Native American political injustice ...

Ndncollective.orgndncollective.org/free-leonard-peltier/

Free Leonard Peltier - NDN COLLECTIVE

Activist Leonard Peltier is now in his 49th year of imprisonment. The injustice of his long incarceration has led the U.S. Attorney who handled the prosecution ...

Freeleonardpeltiernow.orgwww.freeleonardpeltiernow.org/

Free Leonard Peltier Now

is a nationwide initiative to ensure the legacy of Leonard Peltier remains in the forefront of the public eye. As an icon of Native American political injustice 

Apnews.comapnews.com/article/free-leonard-peltier-rally-native-american-e3b4d61d28c7a1a98bb9a74d690dcca4

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Leonard Peltier Case Facts

... News Articles | Frank Blackhorse | Links. ^Top. FREE LEONARD.ORG 1893 Clinton St. • Buffalo, NY 14206. Tel: 716.822.7645 • Email: info@freeleonard.org.

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Tell Biden: Free Leonard Peltier

American Indian Movement (AIM) freedom fighter Leonard Peltier was convicted on false evidence in 1975 and sentenced to two life sentences.

Supporters of Native activist Leonard Peltier hold White House rally ...

Sep 12, 2023 ... Organizers delivered impassioned speeches about Peltier's life and his importance as a Indigenous leader, punctuated by shouts of “Free Peltier!

Biden Should Free Peltier Right Now

On behalf of all Indigenous people in the U.S. and across the globe, enough is enough. We call on President Biden to commute the sentence of Leonard Peltier.

Chauncey Peltier, son of political prisoner Leonard Peltier (pictured on the video behind him), speaks at Harry Belafonte's Many Rivers Music, Art and Social Justice festival, a two-day event with a star-studded lineup of appearances and performances at the Bouckaert Farm,in Chattahoochee Hills, GA, USA, on October 2, 2016. (Photo: Cheriss May/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

LEVI RICKERT

February 2, 2022

 by yahoo!news

The long and sad imprisonment of Leonard Peltier (Turtle Mountain Chippewa Nation) took on a new complication on Friday when it was reported he tested positive for COVID-19 while incarcerated at the United States Penitentiary at Coleman, Fla. (USP Coleman 1).

To many American Indians, Peltier is a symbol of an oppressive federal system that relegates Native people to apartheid and neglect.

Prison is not a great place to have COVID-19, especially if you are a 77-year-old man with comorbidities that include diabetes, hypertension, a heart condition and acute aneurysm, such as Peltier.

The Prison Policy Initiative reported in October 2021 that the COVID-19 death rate in prisons is more than double that of the general U.S. population, as calculated by the UCLA COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project.

Peltier has been incarcerated for 46 years for the killing of two FBI agents at Oglala on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota in 1975.

To many American Indians, Peltier is a symbol of an oppressive federal system that relegates Native people to apartheid and neglect. He is a political prisoner that we may only think about if we happen to see a bumper sticker on the back of a vehicle that reads "FREE Leonard Peltier."

The International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee (ILPDC) on Saturday afternoon distributed a news release saying the federal prisons acted recklessly in regard to Peltier's care. Peltier has yet to receive a COVID-19 booster shot, 11 months after his last vaccination.

The ILPDC noted in its news release that visitors to USP Coleman 1 have observed that the facility is not mandating vaccines for guards or staff. Guards and staff have been seen improperly wearing masks or not wearing them at all. Social distancing was not encouraged or enforced and booster shots had not, until recently, been available to any inmate at USP Coleman 1.

Soon after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, then U.S. Attorney General William Barr issued U.S. Department of Justice guidelines for COVID Release to Home Confinement for inmates who were elderly or with compromised immune system or co-morbidities on March 26 and again, April 3, 2020.

Peltier's age and comorbidities unequivocally make him eligible for home release under Department of Justice guidelines. Peltier's tribal community on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation in North Dakota has repeatedly expressed willingness to ensure he is provided adequate housing there.

Senate Committee on Indian Affairs Chairman Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawai'i), sent a letter to President Joe Biden last Wednesday urging him to commute Peltier's sentence.

"I commend your administration's commitment to righting past wrongs in our criminal justice system. In continuing that work as you consider recommendations for individuals to receive clemency, I write to urge you to grant a commutation of Leonard Peltier's sentence. Mr. Peltier meets appropriate criteria for commutation: (1) his old age and critical illness, (2) the amount of time he has served, and (3) the unavailability of other remedies. Given these factors, Mr. Peltier should be granted a commutation of his sentence," Chairman Schatz wrote.

Beyond Peltier's current battle with COVID-19, the White House needs to review Peltier's 1977 case, in which two of his co-defendants were acquitted on the basis of self-defense against the FBI.

Peltier was tried separately from his co-defendants.

According to Kevin Sharp, former Chief Judge for the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, who Peltier's current attorney, Peltier's trial was replete with prosecutorial misconduct, falsified testimony and fabricated evidence. Even the autopsy presented to the jury was done by an examiner who had never seen the bodies of the two agents.

The former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Iowa, James H. Reynolds, who supervised the post-trial sentencing and appeals, admitted they "shaved a few corners" and "we could not prove Leonard Peltier personally committed any crime on the Pine Ridge Reservation" said in a letter to President Biden last year.

Reynolds wrote "enough is enough."

On behalf of all Indigenous people in the U.S. and across the globe, enough is enough. We call on President Biden to commute the sentence of Leonard Peltier.



LEVI RICKERT (Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation) is the founder, publisher and editor of Native News Online. He can be reached at levi@nativenewsonline.net.

Advocates urge Biden to grant clemency to Leonard Peltier

by Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

February 10, 2022

President Biden must take action, granting long overdue clemency to Leonard Peltier after close to half a century in prison for a blatantly political prosecution.

Leonard Peltier is a 77-year-old Anishinabe-Lakota Native American activist imprisoned for 46 years for a crime he says he did not commit. Amnesty International calls him a political prisoner. Peltier recently contracted COVID-19 inside the Coleman maximum security federal penitentiary in Florida, where prisoners have reportedly been denied vaccine booster shots.

“In and out of lockdown last year at least meant a shower every third day, a meal beyond a sandwich wet with a little peanut butter—but now with COVID for an excuse, nothing,” Peltier recently wrote. “No phone, no window, no fresh air—no humans to gather—no loved one’s voice. No relief. Left alone and without attention is like a torture chamber for the sick and old.”

Peltier, a member of the American Indian Movement, was convicted of involvement in the killing of two FBI agents, Jack Coler and Ron Williams, in a shootout on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota on June 26th, 1975, during a period of intense violence on the reservation. Peltier’s arrest and trial were marred by prosecutorial misconduct, withheld evidence, coerced and fabricated eyewitness testimony, and more.

The shootout occurred just three years after the death of J. Edgar Hoover. Under Hoover, the FBI engaged in widespread illegality with its COINTELPRO program, directed against civil rights and antiwar organizations. Groups like the Black Panthers and individuals including Martin Luther King, Jr. were targeted for surveillance, disruption, infiltration, intimidation, and false prosecutions. The FBI intensively targeted the American Indian Movement, which was active protecting elders on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Peltier’s attorney, Kevin Sharp, learned that Peltier had a negative COVID test recently, but not much more: “When will boosters be made available? Any changes in prison COVID protocols to ensure prisoners are safer? When can I speak to Leonard? ” Sharp wrote in an email to us Wednesday. “I was earlier denied a call with the Assistant Warden trying to get these answers.”

Sharp’s route to Peltier’s case was unusual. Nominated to the federal bench by President Obama in 2011, he served as a federal judge in Tennessee for six years, three of them as Chief Judge. In 2017, he resigned, denouncing the mandatory minimum sentences that he was forced to impose. He then worked for the release of Chris Young, who he had mandatorily sentenced to life without parole. TV personality Kim Kardashian got involved, and they won clemency for Young from President Donald Trump. Publicity from that prompted long-time Peltier supporter Connie Nelson, the ex-wife of musician Willie Nelson, to send Sharp information on Peltier’s case.

“I sat down to read the stacks, just reams of information on Leonard’s case, not really coming at it with any preconceived notion… looking at it from the viewpoint of a federal judge,” Sharp explained on the Democracy Now! news hour. “What I saw was shocking. The constitutional violations just continued to stack up. I was outraged that this man was still in prison.”

The movement for executive clemency for Peltier peaked in late 2000, as President Bill Clinton was leaving office. Clinton promised to give Peltier’s clemency application “a looksee” on WBAI radio in New York City, when he called us on election day to get out the vote.

Clinton infamously abused the presidential power of clemency, granting pardons to campaign donors and cronies of his half-brother, among others. He denied clemency to Peltier, as did his successors, Presidents George W. Bush, Obama and Trump.

One of the federal prosecutors who put Peltier in prison spoke out, in 2017. “Leonard Peltier’s conviction and continued incarceration is a testament to a time and system of justice that no longer has a place in our society,” retired U.S. Attorney James Reynolds wrote to President Obama. “I have realized that the prosecution and the continued incarceration of Mr. Peltier was and is injust.”

Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, who chairs the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, wrote a letter to President Biden on Jan. 28. “I write to urge you to grant a commutation of Leonard Peltier’s sentence. Mr. Peltier meets appropriate criteria for commutation: (1) his old age and critical illness, (2) the amount of time he has already served, and (3) the unavailability of other remedies,” Schatz wrote.

On February 2nd, HuffPost reporter Jennifer Bendery asked White House press secretary Jen Psaki, “Does the President know who Leonard Peltier is?” Psaki replied, “I’m sure he does, but I have not discussed it with him.” Bendery also asked Senate Judiciary Committee chair Sen. Patrick Leahy about Peltier. Leahy said he would ask President Biden about Peltier in their upcoming private meetings.

President Biden must take action, granting long overdue clemency to Leonard Peltier after close to half a century in prison for a blatantly political prosecution.

This column originally appeared in Democracy Now!

ICYMI

Pressure Mounts for Release of Political Prisoner Leonard Peltier

BY LEVI RICKERT 

 

FEBRUARY 12, 2022

NATIVE NEWS

Pressure for President Joe Biden to grant clemency to Leonard Peltier (Turtle Mountain Chippewa Nation) is increasing after it was announced two weeks ago the 77-year-old prisoner contracted COVID-19. Peltier, who tested positive for COVID-19 on January 28, 2022, is incarcerated at the United States Penitentiary at Coleman, Fla. (USP Coleman 1).

Leonard Peltier (Photo/Courtesy)

Peltier was convicted of killing two FBI agents in a shootout at Oglala on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in June 1975. Since many legal experts have maintained the federal case against Peltier was flawed. Native Americans across Indian Country consider him a political prisoner.

Since Peltier was diagnosed with COVID-19, the International Indian Treaty Council, based in Tucson, Ariz. has called on President Biden to release him from prison. In a letter dated Feb. 2, 2022, the IITC tells the president Peltier’s health condition necessitates his release:

“Mr. Peltier has several compounding health conditions, including kidney disease, diabetes, and high blood pressure. COVID-19 is a deadly virus in and of itself and the likelihood of long-COVID disabilities or death increase drastically with pre-existing conditions. A person that contracts COVID-19 with pre-existing kidney disease is twice as likely to succumb to the virus. A person that is over the age of 65 (Mr. Peltier is 77) is 80 times more likely to succumb to the virus.”

The IITC concludes the letter to with a compliment to the Biden administration for its work in Indian Country but emphasizes the need for action on the Peltier case.

“We have seen and felt the commitment the Biden Administration has shown to Indian Country and Indigenous communities. We need to see that same commitment to repair the relationship between the U.S. and Indigenous Peoples of this land in Mr. Peltier’s case,” the letter said.

On Feb. 4, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the longest serving U.S. senator and the president pro tempore of the United States Senate, called on President Biden to release Peltier.

In a statement, Leahy writes:

“I urge President Biden to commute Leonard Peltier’s prison sentence and release him from federal prison. Peltier, a prominent Native American activist, was imprisoned for crimes he and many other legal experts and advocates maintain he never committed. His trial was so riddled with flaws that even one of the prosecutors trying him has acknowledged that Peltier was wrongfully convicted. Peltier, now 77 years old and ailing with multiple health problems, has served more than 44 years in federal prison.”

Leahy concludes his statement by saying: “I call on President Biden to commute Mr. Peltier’s sentence expeditiously. It is the right thing to do.” 

Biden and Leahy spent 36 years serving in the U.S. Senate before Biden became vice president under President Barack Obama.

On Friday, Feb. 10, nine members of Congress, led by Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-AZ),  sent a letter to President Biden, United States Attorney General Merrick Garland, Director of Federal Bureau of Prisons Michael Carvajal, and Southeast Regional Director of Federal Bureau of Prisons William Lothrop, Jr. requesting the expedited release of and clemency for Leonard Peltier. 

In the letter, the members of Congress write:

“In the federal government’s national response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Department of Justice (DOJ) authorized the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to release elderly inmates and those with underlying health conditions from federal prisons. Since Mr. Peltier is 77 years old and suffers from diabetes and an abdominal aortic aneurysm, we urged you to release him from federal custody and grant him clemency immediately. Unfortunately, Mr. Peltier has contracted COVID-19 and is now at risk for additional medical complications.

Given Mr. Peltier’s new COVID-19 diagnosis and to avoid further risks to his health and safety, we urge you to approve his pending petition for clemency on humanitarian grounds.”

A Message to President Biden: No Prisoner Swap Needed to FREE Leonard Peltier


Levi Rickert
Sun, December 11, 2022

Cartoon by Ricardo Cate'. (Photo/Facebook)

Opinion. As Americans were beginning their day this past Thursday, news spread quickly that President Joe Biden’s administration had worked out a deal for the release of Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) superstar and two-time Olympic gold medalist Brittney Griner from a Russian penal colony.

Griner was arrested in February when customs officials in Moscow discovered vape canisters with cannabis oil in her luggage. She pleaded guilty to the offense, sentenced to nine years and was transferred last month to the penal colony.

For months, Griner’s supporters put tremendous pressure on the Biden White House to do everything it could do to secure her release. As part of the negotiations, the Biden administration also worked to secure the release of Paul Whelan, a Michigan corporate security executive who had been held in Russia for four years on spying charges that are thought to be baseless.

In the end, only Griner was released through an exchange brokered by the State Department for arms dealer Viktor Bout, who is nicknamed “Merchant of Death.” He was convicted 11 years ago in by a jury in New York City of conspiracy to kill U.S. citizens and officials, delivery of military equipment and providing assistance to a terrorist organization. He was sentenced to the minimum of 25 years in prison.

Griner’s release required an exchange. Bout was the exchange. Critics are saying Bout for Griner was not an even exchange.

The whole Griner-Bout prisoner swap prompted talented Native American artists Ricardo Caté (Santo Domingo Pueblo), creator of the Santa Fe New Mexican’s daily “Without Reservations” comic strip, to create a cartoon that read; “It doesn’t take a prisoner swap to free Leonard Peltier.”

Caté’s cartoon, as usual, was on target for a bullseye.

President Biden would not have to worry about coming up with an arms dealer criminal to grant the release of Leonard Peltier (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe), who has been incarcerated for 47 years for a crime he did not commit.

Following a controversial trial, Peltier was convicted of aiding and abetting murder and has been imprisoned since 1977. Many people and human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, National Congress of American Indians, the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and others believe Peltier is a political prisoner who should be immediately released.

Kevin Sharp, former chief judge for the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee and now in private practice, spends his time these days seeking the long-overdue release of Peltier.

He gave this statement to Native News Online on Saturday:

“I am happy Brittany Griner is home. Was her trade for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout the right thing to do? That will be for history to decide. But there is another political hostage in this country, Leonard Peltier, and it doesn’t require a swap with the ‘Merchant of Death’ to bring him home. It merely requires the President to sign clemency papers. Leonard’s 47 year incarceration is the product of an FBI vendetta, and the continuation of the government’s mistreatment of Native Americans dating back hundreds of years. Enough is enough. Free Leonard Peltier.”

In a previous conversation with Native News Online in August 2021, Sharp said the federal government now admits they don’t know who shot the agents

“Rather than receiving equal protection under the law, Leonard Peltier was convicted based on fabricated evidence, perjured testimony, and a hidden exculpatory ballistics test. Leonard remains in prison not because of proof beyond a reasonable doubt but because of politics. His last chance at freedom is the collective voice of people who care and dare to stand up for justice and mercy,” Sharp said.

In the case of Griner, there was tremendous pressure put on the White House during the past 10 months to get her freed for what many believe was a miscarriage of justice.

Similarly, there has been a lot of pressure by Native American organizations and many others, including U.S. senators, to see Peltier rightfully set free.

Readers of Native News Online will know I have written several opinion columns calling for the release of Peltier. Obviously, there is a need to write more on this matter.

It is important to keep the pressure on the White House. Letters and calls should not cease. The President should be reminded there is no prisoner swap needed to FREE Leonard Peltier.

About the Author: "Levi Rickert (Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation) is the founder, publisher and editor of Native News Online. Rickert was awarded Best Column 2021 Native Media Award for the print\/online category by the Native American Journalists Association. He serves on the advisory board of the Multicultural Media Correspondents Association. He can be reached at levi@nativenewsonline.net."

Contact: levi@nativenewsonline.net

Free Leonard Peltier
By Nick Estes

March 5, 2023

Source: Jacobin


The way Leonard Peltier tells it, he was a criminal the day he was born — but not by choice. The seventy-eight-year-old Anishinaabe and Dakota elder says his “aboriginal sin” was being born Indian in a country founded on Indians’ forced disappearance.

Recent investigations by the US Department of the Interior into the federal Indian boarding school system have confirmed Peltier’s version of history and what Native people have been saying for generations: that the boarding system was a horrific, sprawling network, encompassing more than four hundred schools across thirty-seven states or then-territories and targeting countless Native children. For more than 150 years, government officials stole Native children from their families, and many never returned home. Federal agents punished, and sometimes imprisoned, recalcitrant parents for keeping their children away from schools where their languages, their sense of self, and sometimes their very lives were taken from them. The child removal policy aimed to destroy Native families and weaken resistance to land seizures.

Peltier was nine years old when a government agent snatched him and his sisters away from their grandmother and placed them at the Wahpeton Boarding School in North Dakota. He remembers his grandmother crying, barely understanding the words of the person taking her grandchildren. He recalls parents singing “that way they do when someone has passed” as their children were loaded onto buses. “Maybe that day was my introduction to this destiny I did not choose,” Peltier wrote last year about his harrowing first day of boarding school. That episode, which he called “one of horror,” has haunted Peltier for life.

Last month marked Peltier’s forty-eighth year behind bars, locked away in a federal penitentiary in Florida, far from his family and homelands, and serving two consecutive life sentences for killing two FBI agents on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in June 1975, a crime he says he did not commit. His supporters consider his life of incarceration a collective punishment for indigenous people’s long history of defiance against US government policies. He is the longest-held indigenous political prisoner in the United States.

A nearly five-decade-long campaign to free Peltier has drawn the support of millions, including many Native nations, politicians, activists, celebrities, and world leaders. In the 1980s, more than seventeen million Soviet citizens sent petitions to Washington calling for Peltier’s release. Their government granted him political asylum and sent him a physician to examine his ailing eyes. The Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, where Peltier is enrolled, has urged President Joe Biden to free its elderly citizen and has prepared for his return home. Even a former federal prosecutor who helped keep Peltier in prison has petitioned for his clemency. Last year, United Nations experts recommended Peltier’s immediate release after finding that his imprisonment was so excessive it amounted to arbitrary detention.

Despite all appeals, the FBI remains the most outspoken opponent of freeing Peltier. “Retribution seems to have emerged as the primary if not sole reason” for Peltier’s continued imprisonment, Coleen Rowley, a retired FBI agent who was close to his case, wrote in a letter to Biden last December urging Peltier’s release. She called the FBI’s near half-century campaign an “emotion-driven ‘FBI family’ vendetta” against Peltier and the American Indian Movement.

Leonard Peltier, AIM, and the Fight for Native Rights

Born in 1944, Peltier joined the American Indian Movement (AIM) during the group’s heyday in the 1960s and 1970s. AIM had been formed in 1968 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, partly to end Native family separation and police violence. Two studies from 1969 to 1974 found that 25 to 35 percent of all Native children had been separated from their families and placed into institutions, foster care, or adoptive families. Many of AIM’s founders, like Peltier, had survived boarding schools only to face racism and inner-city poverty, incarceration, or the threat of having their families broken apart. AIM’s purpose was to build an alternative to this grim reality and to fight for Native rights.

Post–World War II Indian policy in the United States sought to formally end relations between the government and American Indian nations. “Termination policy” abolished more than one hundred tribes and removed millions of acres of land from federal trust status, opening them up for privatization and resource extraction. “Relocation policy” aimed to finish what termination had started by inducing hundreds of thousands of Native people to leave their reservations to find employment in far-off urban centers like Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Urban poverty and discrimination replaced rural, reservation poverty. These assimilationist policies gave rise to the Red Power movement in the 1960

s.

A wall on Alcatraz with the written message, “Indians Welcome.”

 (Loco Steve / Wikimedia Commons)

Urban Native activists began occupying abandoned federal property to dramatize their demands, famously taking over the Alcatraz prison island in San Francisco Bay in 1969. AIM followed suit, leading a nationwide takeover of Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) offices in 1970 in protest of discriminatory hiring practices that privileged white employees over American Indian employees. The actions helped transform AIM from a local Twin Cities, Minnesota organization into a national movement.

By 1972 AIM had chapters in every region of the United States, and the same year, Peltier formerly joined AIM. He followed the movement to Washington, DC, taking over BIA headquarters during the Trail of Broken Treaties, which sought to reestablish treaty-making and nation-to-nation relations with the United States.

That action drew the ire of tribal leaders in the Oglala Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation, located largely in South Dakota, who banned AIM leaders from the reservation. Dissident Oglalas called on AIM to take a stand at Wounded Knee, abolish the tribal council, and reinstate the validity of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty and the traditional Lakota government. They obliged — for seventy-one days, beginning on February 27, 1973, Oglalas and members of AIM occupied Wounded Knee, South Dakota on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Following the highly publicized takeover, violence and terror gripped the Pine Ridge. Dick Wilson, the autocratic tribal president, led a vicious crackdown on reservation dissidents, who sought to overturn a corrupt tribal council system that catered to outside economic interests and the assimilationist policies of the BIA. AIM allied itself with the “traditionals,” those who defended Lakota spirituality, sovereignty, and treaty rights. Elders, like Celia and Harry Jumping Bull, called upon Peltier and AIM for protection from Wilson’s vigilante “goon squad” and the FBI, who were waging a low-intensity dirty war against AIM and its supporters in the aftermath of Wounded Knee.

Leonard Peltier’s 1972 headshot. (FBI via Wikimedia Commons)

Two months before the firefight that would change Peltier’s life — and following the 1974 acquittal of AIM leadership involved in the Wounded Knee takeover — the FBI issued an internal position paper entitled “FBI Paramilitary Operations in Indian Country,” a how-to plan for confronting AIM in a battlefield-type situation. The report referred to an area outside the village of Oglala as having bunkers that would require a paramilitary force to overtake. The month before the firefight, FBI personnel, mostly SWAT team members, swarmed the Pine Ridge Reservation. One FBI map of the Jumping Bull property identified “bunkers” that turned out to be crumbling root cellars. Tensions were high, and the FBI appeared ready for war.

On June 25, 1975, FBI agents Ronald Williams and Jack Coler wore plain clothes and drove unmarked vehicles into the Jumping Bull ranch — outside Oglala on the western side of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation — while supposedly serving a warrant for assault and theft of a pair of cowboy boots. The agents never identified themselves, and a firefight erupted, catching a family with small children in the cross fire.

The shooting roused Peltier and his AIM group, which included Native youths, some of whom returned fire. One hundred fifty FBI agents, BIA police, and local vigilantes surrounded the property shortly after the shooting started. Peltier, his group, and local residents barely escaped through a barrage of bullets.

When the shooting stopped, three lay dead. The FBI claims Williams and Coler were shot in the head at close range. Joe Stuntz, a twenty-three-year-old member of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe, was also killed. An unknown police agent shot Stuntz in the head. No one was ever prosecuted for his murder.

Meanwhile, Peltier and his group split up. Some of the youngsters returned to pay their respects at Stuntz’s funeral. Peltier and the others went underground. But the FBI, leading one the largest manhunts in its history, eventually caught up with them, eager to mete out its version of justice.

The Trials

The circumstances surrounding the June 1975 firefight — which a US Commission on Civil Rights investigation described as part of an FBI “reign of terror” against AIM and its supporters — were enough to convince an all-white jury in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 1976 to acquit Peltier’s codefendants of murder charges on grounds of self-defense.

Bob Robideau and Dino Butler’s defense offered evidence of the FBI’s history of misconduct, which had recently been revealed during high-profile Senate hearings spearheaded by Idaho senator Frank Church. Church himself testified at the trial that “certain groups” — like the Communist Party, the Black Panthers, and the antiwar movement — “were targeted for surveillance [by the FBI] at least in part because of political attitudes.” AIM, too, faced its share of FBI harassment: disruptive informants, bad-jacketing campaigns, and paranoia-inducing surveillance.

The evidence presented was so damning that Peltier would be free today if he had been tried alongside Butler and Robideau. But he was prosecuted separately, with the government selecting a less sympathetic judge and less favorable venue (Fargo, North Dakota).

Peltier had fled after the shoot-out to Canada, where he was arrested and extradited to the United States based on false affidavits given by Myrtle Poor Bear, who claimed to be Peltier’s girlfriend at the time and an eyewitness to the agents’ killings. She was neither, nor had she ever met Peltier before his trial. Poor Bear later recanted her story, claiming she was coerced and threatened by FBI agents to provide false testimony. Other witnesses said FBI agents also threatened them or coerced their testimony.

FBI bullying of witnesses, however, was not allowed to be presented as evidence to the jury, nor was the climate of fear the FBI had created on the reservation. The prosecution withheld important ballistics evidence, it was later revealed, that could have been exculpatory. And one juror openly admitted to the court that she was “prejudiced against Indians” yet was allowed to remain on the jury.

In April 1977, the jury found Peltier guilty, and the judge sentenced him to two consecutive life sentences. “I have done nothing to feel guilty about,” Peltier told the judge. “The only thing I am guilty of and which I was convicted for was of being Chippewa and Sioux blood and for believing our sacred religion.”

On appeal, the government was forced to drop its theory that Peltier personally shot the agents due to lack of evidence. It instead pivoted to an accusation of aiding and abetting their murder. When asked whom Peltier was aiding and abetting, US Attorney Lynn Crooks answered, “whoever did the final shooting.” He added: “Perhaps aiding and abetting himself.”

Putting aside the absurdity of aiding and abetting oneself, Peltier could not have aided and abetted his codefendants, because aiding and abetting self-defense is not a crime. And according to the government’s own account, his codefendants were the only people close to the agents’ bodies during the firefight.

The theory upon which Peltier’s conviction now rests “is that he was guilty of murder simply because he was present with a weapon at the Reservation that day,” former US Attorney James Reynolds write in a 2021 letter to President Biden asking for Peltier’s clemency. Reynolds worked on Peltier’s prosecution and appeals cases, but believes today that his prosecution and continued incarceration “was and is unjust.” The prosecution was “not able to prove that Mr. Peltier personally committed any offense on the Pine Ridge Reservation.”

In a phone interview, Peltier told me that the facts of his case prove his innocence — but that the truth alone has not set him free.

Freedom for Peltier

Three days before the Jumping Bull shoot-out, the Church Committee decided to investigate FBI surveillance of AIM. But the decision was hushed up the day after the firefight. The International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee and Oglala members have been calling for a congressional investigation into the murders, rapes, and beatings that went uninvestigated or unsolved during that reign of terror.

According to Coleen Rowley, the former FBI agent, the bureau “indoctrinated” new agents at Quantico in the prosecution’s version of Peltier’s case in the 1980s. While FBI agents have restricted First Amendment rights, they made an exception for Peltier, she said, encouraging agents to write op-eds against his release and even marching in front of the White House during the final days of the Clinton administration to oppose a possible presidential pardon. Rowley is a rare dissenting voice as a retired FBI agent once close to Peltier’s case.

But there are more unanswered questions about Peltier’s case and uncertainty about his freedom. In a recent message to supporters, he spoke about his fear of never getting out of prison, or of only having a limited amount of time with his family before he leaves this world for the next.

February marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Wounded Knee occupation, but the wounds of the past have not been healed. The 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, which aimed to reverse the Native family separation that took away Peltier and countless others, is on the chopping block at the Supreme Court. And the Biden administration has been silent about Peltier’s clemency application — his only legal chance at freedom.

“I live in the nation’s fastest-growing reservation in the United States,” Peltier once said about his predicament in federal prison.

But in a recent statement to supporters, Peltier expressed hope and encouraged them to teach their children “to plant a food forest or any plant that will provide for them in the future.”

“Plant a tree for me,” Peltier said.