President Biden, It’s Long Past Time to Pardon Leonard Peltier
60 HRS TO GO
Leonard Peltier, Leavenworth Federal Prison, 1992. Photo courtesy of Amnesty International.
President Biden is about to leave office effective next Monday. He will be leaving under a cloud, having spent last a1 months of his single term of office as an accomplice, apologist, diplomatic enabler and essential arms supplier of of Israeli genocide in Gaza. He has attempted do do some good thing while stuck with hostile control of Congress for two years of his four-year term and with a very narrow majority in the Senate,
He leaves, his mental capacities clearly diminished and in decline, but worse, amidst suspicions that his White House staff have been hiding knowledge that he was not functioning on all cylinders mentally for a considerable part of his presidency — a troubling affair concern was also suspected of during the second presidential term of Ronald Reagan, who was later diagnosed with Alzheimers.
Even in his last days, when Biden made use of the one absolute power that he had as a lame-duck president: the power of the pardon. Instead of striking out boldly in the interest of justice in a nation whose legal system has become increasingly unfair to those without resources to hire top-flight attorneys and pursue expensive appeals of convictions, he has chosen to issue a ground-breaking and controversial broad and sweeping pardon of his own son Hunter, to keep him out of federal prison for ling on a federal gun application, protesting him from any prosecution on other related charges — something he could have done for tens of thousands of people languishing in the nation’’s federal prisons simply because they had bargain basement court-appointed attorneys who advised them to cop a plea rather than risk being convicted on heavier charges—even if those defendants were actually not guilty of anything.
While Biden granted sweeping pardons and clemencies to 37 prisoners sitting in jail facing death sentences, saying as he did so that he wanted death penalties but he left three of those doomed inmates no clemency, claiming that they had committed race-based crimes or in one case terrorism. But that failure to life their death sentences undermined his claim to oppose the death penalty.
Capital punishment is particularly cruel and unusual in the Constitutional sense not because it is too extreme so much as because judges, jurors, prosecutors and defense attorneys can make mistakes — mistakes that can lead to wrongful findings of guilt — and an execution is not a reversible punishment that can be undone if new evidence of innocence turns up, such as a recantation by a crucial witness for the prosecution, or DNA evidence not available at trial proves that the convicted capital prisoner could not have committed the crime as charged. The number of people who have been freed from a death sentence in time to prevent its being carried out is over 100. The number who have been wrongfully put to death by the State is unknowable but is certainly far higher than that. Biden should not have exempted those three other doomed federal prisoners from his pardon/clemency list.
There is still time for him to do better.
He should immediately tell his staff to draw up clemencies or pardons for the last three remaining death penalty prisoners in federal prisons, and should go further, issuing preemptive clemencies against the death penalty to any people currently facing federal capital charges or recently convicted but not yet sentenced in federal capital cases. One would be Louigi Mangione, the young man charged with murdering the CEO of United HealthCare.
There is also another pardon (not just clemency!) that Biden should show the courage to issue, and that is Native American and American Indian Movement (AIM) activist and federal prisoner Leonard Peltier. Now 80 years old, frail and ill, Peltier is serving two consecutive life sentences on conviction for first-degree murder of two FBI agents in a 1975 shoot-out with federal agents and Native American activists on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
He has been in prison since his 1977 conviction for a crime he insists he did not commit. Over his 5 years of incarceration, he has gained the support for his release from the likes of Senators. Bernie Sanders and Brian Schatz, Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Suzan Harjo, an indigenous rights advocate, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, Pope Francis, Amnesty International, the National Lawyers Guild, the American Association of jurists and Human Rights Watch.
Even more compellingly, in case Biden needs spine-stiffening to go against a half century of dogged opposition to any relief of Peltier by the FBI, James Reynolds, a senior attorney and the us Attorney who supervised the prosecution team fighting Peltier’s appeal of his conviction, ha called for clemency saying it would be ‘in the best interest of justice in considering the totality of all matters involved.”
Explaining his position, in a letter to the Chicago Tribune, Reynolds wrote that the case brought by the US Justice Department again Peltier was “a ver thin case that likely would not be upheld by courts today.” He said “It is a gross overstatement to label Peltier a ‘cold-blooded murderer’ on he bases of the minimum proof that survived the appeals in this case.”
Regardless of Reynolds’ stated position, Barack Obama shamefully rejected Peltier’s petition for clemency, as did Presidents Clinton and Bush before him.
Another law enforcement person, police officer Bob Newbrook, who initially arrested Peltier, says he is convinced he”was extradited [from Canada] illegally and that he didn’t get a fair trial in the United States.”
The fact that the FBI is solidly opposed to any relief — even just “compassionate release” based upon his age and poor health (he is blind in one eye following a stroke and needs a walker to get around outside the small cage he is kept in most days) likely is holding back commutation any decision by Biden, but he could still That is a third option offer him compassionate release to allow him to leave prison and spend his last years with his children and grandchildren in the house built for him and his family by supporters. Peltier has said he would accept an order of home confinement if he could be released there.
It shouldn’t be so hard for Biden. After all, President Nixon granted to Lt. Calley a compassionate release to home confinement only three days after he had been convicted for the murders of 22 peasant men women and children in the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, and before he was even sentenced for that horrific war crime.
If Biden can’t even free Peltier from a half century of prison for a increasingly dubious conviction of two murders he likely didn’t even commit, it will cap what is a very dark departure from the Whit House by a failed president.
Please call the White House and demand that Biden grant clemency or a compassionate release to Leonard Peltier before he leaves the White House. To take action go to:
