How does someone who maintains their innocence achieve parole when the criteria is an admission of guilt and remorse for a crime they say they did not commit? In 1976 Leonard Peltier was convicted of the murders of two FBI agents and sentenced to two consecutive life sentences in maximum security prisons. He has proclaimed his innocence for 47 years.
The moral dilemma in questionable cases remains. The USA has identified around 2,500 wrongful convictions. In that same time, the UK has identified around 450 wrongful convictions, including those of four people who had been hanged. International human rights leaders, including Pope Francis, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu and Coretta Scott King, Harry Belafonte all supported his case in addition to appeals by U.S. Senators and Native American leaders. Robert Redford’s 1992 documentary, Incident at Oglala, recounted the facts of the case and Peltier’s trial, Redford continues to call for his release.
In a 17-page document in May 2023, an arbitrary detention working group for the U.N. Human Rights Council said the U.S. government should free Leonard Peltier. It also said the country should conduct an independent investigation into whether the Native American’s rights were violated. A 1,103 miles, Leonard Peltier Walk to Justice culminates in Washington, D.C. Lincoln Memorial 2022.
What happened on February 27 1973? Protesting the injustice and conditions on the reservation and bringing attention to the broken treaties, some 200 members of the American Indian Movement and their Oglala Lakota supporters occupied the town of Wounded Knee on Pine Ridge, the site of the 1890 massacre by the US 7th Cavalry which killed at least 300 unarmed Indians – mostly women and children. The occupation of Wounded Knee was met by a massive show of force by the FBI, US Marshals, and Tribal Police. Military armoured personnel carriers rumbled down the reservation’s roads, and the occupation ended after a 71 day standoff which saw two Indians, Frank Clearwater and Buddy LaMont, killed by gunfire. FBI agents, Jack Coler and Ronald Williams, were looking to arrest a man named Jimmy Eagle, who was suspected of stealing a pair of cowboy boots.
- At the time of the trial key alleged eyewitness to the shootings was Myrtle Poor Bear, a Lakota Native woman. Her statement that she saw Leonard Peltier kill both FBI agents led to his extradition from Canada, where he had fled. However, Myrtle Poor Bear later retracted her statement and was not called as a prosecution witness at trial but the trial judge refused to allow the defence to call her as a witness on the grounds that her testimony “could be highly prejudicial to the government”. In 2000, Myrtle Poor Bear later said that her original statement was the result of months of threats and harassment from FBI agents.
- In 1980, documents were released to Leonard Peltier’s lawyers via a Freedom of Information Act request, it showed that the FBI had intentionally withheld evidence containing ballistics evidence which might have assisted his case but which had been withheld by the prosecution at trial. A ballistics expert had unequivocally ruled out Peltier’s gun as the murder weapon.
- In 1986 Peltier’s attorneys appealed his case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit, The U.S. attorney’s office changed its story, dropping its argument that Peltier had murdered the agents stating that he “aided and abetted” whoever did do it. Peltier’s two other co-defendants were acquitted based on self-defense. “Even the prosecutors subsequently admitted that they have no idea who shot the agents at point-blank range.”. The 8th Circuit upheld the decision. 1970s standard for reviewing a Brady violation in a criminal conviction, i.e. whether a jury would have come to a different conclusion based on the new evidence has changed. In an extraordinary letter, five years later, the 8th Circuit judge, Gerald Heaney, who authored the decision to uphold Peltier’s conviction, ended up urging clemency for him. Before he died, Bob Robideau, one of the men acquitted in the shooting, admitted he killed both men.
These are the words of Leonard Petier on June 26 2017 in anticipation of his Presidential Appeal to Barrack Obama: “June 26th marks 41 years since the long summer day when three young men were killed at the home of the Jumping Bull family, near Oglala, during a firefight in which I and dozens of others participated. While I did not shoot (and therefore did not kill) FBI agents Ronald Williams and Jack Coler, I nevertheless have great remorse for the loss of their young lives, the loss of my friend Joe Stuntz, and for the grieving of their loved ones. I would guess that, like me, many of my brothers and sisters, who were there that day wish that somehow they could have done something to change what happened and avoid the tragic outcome of the shootout.This is not something I have thought about casually and then moved on. It’s something I think about every day. As I look back, I remember the expressions of both fear and courage on the faces of my brothers and sisters as we were being attacked. We thought we were going to be killed!
We defended our elders and children as they scattered for protection and to escape. Native people have experienced such assaults for centuries, and the historical trauma of the generations was carried by the people that day — and in the communities that suffered further trauma in the days that followed the shootout, as the authorities searched for those of us who had escaped the Jumping Bull property.
As the First Peoples of Turtle Island, we live with daily reminders of the centuries of efforts to terminate our nations, eliminate our cultures, and destroy our relatives and families. To this day, everywhere we go there are reminders — souvenirs and monuments of the near extermination of a glorious population of Indigenous Peoples. Native Peoples as mascots, the disproportionately high incarceration of our relatives, the appropriation of our culture, the never-ending efforts to take even more of Native Peoples’ land, and the poisoning of that land all serve as reminders of our history as survivors of a massive genocide. We live with this trauma every day. We breathe, eat and drink it. We pass it on to our children. And we struggle to overcome it.
Like so many Native children, I was ripped away from my family at the age of 9 or so and taken away to get the “Indian” out of me at a boarding school. At that time, Native Peoples were not able to speak our own languages for fear of being beaten or worse. Our men’s long hair, which is an important part of our spiritual life, was forcibly cut off in an effort to shame us. Our traditional names were replaced by new European-American names. These efforts to force our assimilation continue today. Not long ago, I remember, a Menominee girl was punished and banned from playing on the school’s basketball team because she taught a classmate how to say “hello” and “I love you” in her Native language. We hear stories all the time about athletes and graduates who face opposition to wearing their hair long or having a feather in their cap.
With this little bit of my personal history in mind, I think it is understandable that I would then, as a young person in the 1960’s and 70’s, be active in the Indigenous struggle to affirm our human, civil, and treaty rights. Our movement was a spiritual one to regain our ceremonies and traditions and to exercise our sovereignty as native or tribal nations. For over 100 years some of our most important ceremonies could not be held. We could not sing our songs or dance to our drum. When my contemporaries and I were activists, there were no known sun dances.
Any ceremony that took place had to be hidden for fear of reprisals. One of our roles as activists for the welfare of our Peoples was to create space and protection for Native peoples who were trying to reconnect to our ancient cultures and spiritual life. This was dangerous and deadly. It meant putting our lives on the line because people who participated in these ceremonies and people who stood up for our elders and our traditional way of life, were brutally beaten, killed or disappeared. Paramilitary groups and death squads ruled some reservations and each day was a battle. If an uninvited, unknown or unrecognised vehicle pulled up to your house, the first reaction was that you were being visited by someone who meant to do you harm in some way. This was learned behaviour on the reservations. This was excruciatingly true in the 1970’s.
Hey, I don’t want to be all doom and gloom here. I see over the decades that in some important ways, life has improved for our Peoples. President Obama’s extraordinary efforts to forge a strong relationship with our Tribal Nations is good cause for a new sense of optimism that our sovereignty is more secure. By exercising our sovereignty, life for our people might improve. We might begin to heal and start the long journey to move past the trauma of the last 500 years. But what will we do if the next Administration rolls back those gains made over the past 8 years?
I often receive questions in letters from supporters about my health. Yes, this last year has been particularly stressful for me and my family. My health issues still have not been thoroughly addressed, and I still have not gotten the results of the MRI done over a month ago for the abdominal aortic aneurysm. As the last remaining months of President Obama’s term pass by, my anxiety increases. I believe that this President is my last hope for freedom, and I will surely die here if I am not released by January 20, 2017. So I ask you all again, as this is the most crucial time in the campaign to gain my freedom, please continue to organise public support for my release, and always follow the lead of the International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee.
Thank you for all you have done and continue to do on my behalf.
Leonard Peltier ”
Leonard Peltier’s application was denied by President Obama on January 18, 2017. Under the Constitution, there is no appeal from this decision. In what must surely be a final appeal for clemency a new petition is due in 2024. Opposition from the FBI remains the biggest obstacle to his freedom. As of 2022, Peltier is incarcerated at the United States Penitentiary, Coleman in Florida.