Biden in Last-Minute Final Act as President Commutes Leonard Peltier Prison Sentence!

After 50 Years in jail on a double life-sentence Indigenous activist gets home confinement on his tribal reservation with family

Leonard Peltier, (KVRR screen shot)

President Biden, under mounting pressure from over 120 leaders of the nation’s indigenous tribes from across the country, just moments before his presidency ended yesterday along with his pardon power, finally issued a commutation to Native American activist Leonard Peltier.

Now 80 years old an in failing health, Peltier has spent half a century in prison serving double life sentence declared in 1977 by the judge following the Native American’s conviction in a federal trial in South Dakota. The judge in setting his penalty punitively made the two life sentences to run consecutively for the shooting deaths of two FBI agents in 1975.

Over the years, Peltier’s controversial case has been taken up by Amnesty International, the National Lawyers Guild, The American Society of Jurists, Native Rights activist groups, and noted people from Pope Francis to the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa. Thirty members of Congress this year called on Biden to act to free Peltier before leaving office.

Significantly, James Reynolds, the US Attorney who directed the Justice Department’s legal strategy in opposing Peltier’s appeal of his conviction, publicly condemned his original trial as a miscarriage of justice, saying it had not proved his guilt because of lack of evidence, withheld exculpatory evidence and other errors and prosecutorial and judicial misconduct. In a July, 2021 letter to Biden, Reynolds urged Biden to commute Peltier’s sentence and release him from prison.

“I write today from a position rare for a former prosecutor: to beseech you to commute the sentence of a man who I helped put behind bars,” he wrote, explaining, “With time, and the benefit of hindsight, I have realized that the prosecution and continued incarceration of Mr. Peltier was and is unjust. We were not able to prove that Mr. Peltier personally committed any offense on the Pine Ridge Reservation.”

Reynolds’ letter did not sway Biden, but a national and global campaign that saw hundreds of thousands of letters pour into the White House calling for Peltier’s release apparently finally did.

The decades of organizing took painfully long, but in the end this decision to release him from prison confinement has proved the importance of determined, tireless struggle.

Three presidents before Biden— Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and George W Bush - all lacked the courage to pardon Peltier or grant him clemency, fearing the wrath of law enforcement groups and especially the FBI, itself which strongly opposed any mercy or reconsideration of his case. Even at this late hour Christopher Wray, the FBI director since 2007, who resigned just before Trump took the oath of office Monday, knowing he would be sacked by the incoming president, opposed a Biden an offer of clemency in a private letter . Calling Peltier “a remorseless killer” in his letter to Biden, Wray added, "Granting Peltier any relief from his conviction or sentence is wholly unjustified and would be an affront to the rule of law.”

But many in Biden’s administration were calling for action to free Peltier. Biden’s outgoing Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, the first Native American cabinet secretary in history, said she was “beyond words” at Biden’s last-minute decision, adding, ″It signifies a measure of justice that has long evaded so many Native Americans for so many decades. I am grateful that Leonard can now go home to his family. I applaud President Biden for this action and understanding what this means to Indian Country.”

Saving Peltier from the fate of dying alone in a high-security prison was not a sure thing even as of Monday morning. With Trump taking over as president as of noon on Jan. 20, Biden still hadn’t made his decision on a commutation for Peltier. In fact as the clock ticked towards that moment, Biden and his wife were hosting Trump and his wife to a traditional “handover tea” in the White House.

But in the end, with less than a minute to go of his presideny, Biden relented and signed the clemency order. But the reluctance of this man who as a Senator chaired the Senate Judicial Committee and oversaw with President Clinton a harsh series of “reforms” stiffening criminal penalties and making appeals especially of capital cases much more difficult, stressed that he was not freeing Peltier, but only shifting his condition os confinement from a prison cell to house arrest.

Peltier himself is still locked today in his tiny solitary cell in the federal prison, USP Coleman in Florida, as Bureau of Prison authorities take their time doing the paperwork for him to be transferred from there to confinement in a house in South Dakota that was built for him by supporters on the reservation of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, where his children and grandchildren are waiting for him.

Peltier suffers from damage done by a stroke that left him blind in one eye and in need of a walker and, as a result of poor prison health care also has diabetes and a diagnosed but untreated aortal aneurism. Once out of prison and in his own home, albeit confined there on the Rez, will at least be able to receive the medical care he should have received long ago (prisoners in the US, thanks to rulings by the Supreme Court, do not have a Constitutional right to all appropriate medical care).

Peltier had said he would not accept a pardon, which he correctly noted “is an admission of guilt.” He also said that he would be willing to accept an alternative sentence of house arrest to escape spending his remaining years in a high-security prison.

Informed of the commutation of his sentence, he said, "It's finally over — I'm going home. I want to show the world I'm a good person with a good heart."

Because he didn’t receive a pardon he remains free to seek to have a court overturn his conviction.

While as his last official act Biden finally did let Leonard Peltier get out of prison, though only to remain under house arest, he departs the White House forever defined as an aider and abettor of Israeli genocide in Gaza.