Bain grants clemency to activist Leonard Peltier to end life sentence at home
US President Joe Biden commuted the life sentence of Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier, who was convicted of killing two FBI agents in 1975.
Peltier has been denied parole since July and is not eligible for parole again until 2026. He was serving a life sentence for the agents’ deaths in a skirmish on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.
He will be transferred to house arrest, Biden said in a statement.
Biden holds the presidential record for most individual pardons and commutations. He announced on Friday that he is considering commuting sentences for nearly 2,500 people convicted of non-violent drug crimes. He also granted a broad pardon to his son Hunter, who had been convicted of gun and tax crimes.
On Monday, Biden pardoned Gerald Lundergan, a Kentucky Democrat who served in the state House of Representatives. He was accused of making illegal campaign contributions to his daughter’s US Senate campaign. Ernest William Cromartie, a former Columbia, South Carolina city councilman convicted of tax fraud, has been pardoned.
Peltier’s struggle for independence was intertwined with indigenous rights movements. Nearly half a century later, his name is still a rallying cry.
A registered member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewas in North Dakota, Peltier was active in the American Indian Movement, which began as an indigenous organization in Minneapolis in the 1960s, fighting against police brutality and discrimination against Native Americans. It quickly became a national power.
The movement grabbed headlines in 1973 when a 71-day standoff with federal agents took over the village of Wounded Knee on Pine Ridge. Tensions between the movement and the government have persisted for years.
On June 26, 1975, agents went to Pine Ridge to serve an arrest warrant amid the Treaty Rights and Self-Determination struggles.
After being wounded in the shootout, agents Jack Kohler and Ronald Williams were shot in the head at close range, the FBI said. Joseph Stuntz, a member of the American Indian Movement, was killed in the shooting.
Two other members of the movement, Robert Robideau and Dino Butler, were charged with murdering Kohler and Williams and acquitted.
After fleeing to Canada and being extradited to the United States, Peltier was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison in 1977 after being convicted of tampering with evidence.
Last year, the Assembly of First Nations reversed 37 years of support for Peltier, citing what he said was a questioning of slain activist Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, a Nova Scotia Mi’kmaw woman.