Commute All Pending Capital Case Defendents and Release Leonard Peltier!
And commute the sentences of all non-violent federal inmates who are over 60
I want to talk about president Biden’s final pardons, which will likely be the last official thing he does besides closing the door to the White House and turning over the keys to the new tenant. My concern is he hasn’t used that power well at all so far, and one thing he needs to do is free Native American political prisoner Leonard Peltier.
There is a particularly powerful urgency for action because the incoming President-elect Trump has long shown himself to be an enthusiastic fan of executions, and is even talking about extending the number of crimes for which the death penalty could be applied.
Biden, who leaves under a cloud, having spent the last 16 months of his single term of office as an accomplice, apologist, diplomatic enabler and essential arms supplier of Israel’s campaign of genocide of upwards of 65,000 trapped Palestinians in Gaza. True, he has attempted to do some good things while saddled with a hostile Supreme Court and a dysfunctional and Trump-besotted of House for the second two years of his four-year term and with only a very narrow majority in the Senate, but not all he could have done.
His mental capacity is clearly diminished and in decline, but worse, he faces 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 matter that was also suspected of during the second presidential term of Ronald Reagan, who was, after he left office diagnosed publicly with Alzheimers.
Even in his last days, when Biden made use of the one absolute power that he still has had as a lame-duck president — the power of the pardon — he turned chicken. He could have of struck out boldly in the interest of doing all he could to restore justice in a nation whose punitive legal system he knows has become increasingly unfair to those without resources to hire top-flight attorneys and pursue expensive appeals of convictions. Instead, he has chosen to issue a ground-breaking and controversial broad and sweeping preemptive pardon but only for his own troubled son Hunter, to keep him out of federal prison. Indeed he has conceded that as a former chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee he he helped make that happen.
Hunter Biden was guilty of a felony — lying on a federal gun-buying permit application— but his prosecution was clearly politically motivated and he was at risk of a heavy jail sentence under an incoming Trump Justice Department and a new president who has vowed to seek ‘vengeance” against his political enemies. Biden’s action on his son’s case would have been acceptable — the concern of a father for his child — had he expanded the action to include the tens of thousand or people languishing in federal prisons for non-violent felonies simply because they only had overworked and sometimes disinterested court-appointed attorneys who advised them to cop a plea on a lesser charge rather than risk being convicted on heavier charges—even if many those defendants have not been guilty of anything.
Biden did grant a record number of clemencies and a few pardons to 37 prisoners sitting in jail facing death sentences. He explained as he did so that he wanted death penalties to be ended in the US as has been done in most of the rest of the world’s more developed nations and many others as well. But he left three of those doomed prisoners with clemency, claiming that they had committed terrible race-based or terrorism crimes.
That failure to lift those death sentences, not because of the circumstances of their trials but simply because of the nature of the charges, undermined his claim to oppose the death penalty itself.
Capital punishment is particularly cruel and unusual punishment in the Constitutional sense whatever the Supreme Court majority may think. This is not because it is too extreme (though of course it is, along with solidtary confinement and life without parole), but because judges, jurors, prosecutors and defense attorneys can and often do make mistakes or commit misconduct at trial— mistakes or misconduct that could likely lead to wrongful findings of guilt. And an execution is uniquely not a reversible punishment that can be undone if new evidence of innocence or of judicial or prosecutorial misconduct turns up, such as a recantation by a crucial witness for the prosecution, hidden exonerating evidence or or DNA evidence not available at trial which could have proved or created a reasonable doubt among jurors 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 well 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.
Now it is too late for him to do that. Trump in the White House won’t care a whit about such injustice.
Biden should have immediately ordered his staff to draw up clemencies or pardons for the last three remaining death penalty prisoners he left on death row, as time is really short. He should indeed have gone further, issuing preemptive clemencies against the death penalty to any persons currently facing federal capital charges or recently convicted but not yet sentenced in federal capital cases. Like Louigi Mangione, the young man charged with murdering the CEO of United HealthCare.
There is also another pardon (not just clemency!) that Biden should have shown the courage to issue, and didn’t, and that was for American Indian Movement (AIM) indigenous 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 insists he didn’t commit. Over his 50 years of incarceration (counting the two years in jail wwhilw awaiting his trial), he has gained support for his release from the likes of Senators Bernie Sanders and Brian Schatz, indigenous rights activist and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Suzan Harjo, 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 some spine-stiffening to go against a half century of dogged opposition to any relief of Peltier by the FBI, there’s James Reynolds, a senior attorney and the very US Attorney who supervised the prosecution team fighting against Peltier’s appeal of his conviction. Reynolds has 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, he wrote that the case brought by the US Justice Department’s initial prosecution of Peltier initially was “a very 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 the bases of the minimum proof that survived the appeals in this case.”
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.”
Regardless of Reynolds’ stated position, Presidents Bill Clinton and G. W. Bush rejected his petition for clemency. Shamefully, so did a President Barack Obama.
The fact that the FBI is solidly opposed to any relief — even just “compassionate release” based upon Peltier’s 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 back deterring Biden from issuing a clemency. But he could still could grant him a compassionate release to allow him to leave prison and spend his last years with his children and grandchildren to be served 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.
That shouldn’t be so hard for “family man” Biden. After all, if President Nixon could grant Lt. William 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 do it before he was even sentenced for that horrific war crime, Surely after serving half a century in a federal lock-up, guilty or not, Peltier should get the same thing..
If Biden can’t even free Peltier from a half century of prison time for an increasingly dubious conviction of two murders he likely didn’t even commit, it will cap what is a very dark departure from the White House by a failed president.
Please URGENTLY call the White House COMMENT LINE (T: 202-456-1111) and demand that Biden grant clemency or a compassionate release to Leonard Peltier before he leaves the White House. Or take action by filling out a petition to Biden:
you need to copyedit this