Amnesty International has launched a new campaign calling on Joe Biden to grant clemency for Leonard Peltier, the Indigenous rights activist whose health is deteriorating after almost five decades in maximum security prison for crimes he has always denied.
The international human rights group is urging Biden to release Peltier on humanitarian grounds – exactly 46 years after he was convicted for killing two FBI agents in a trial rife with irregularities and due process violations including evidence that the agency coerced witnesses and withheld and falsified evidence.
“No one should be locked up, let alone for over 40 years, when there are serious concerns about the fairness of their trial. President Biden should right this historic wrong and grant Leonard Peltier clemency,” said Zeke Johnson, Amnesty International US national director of campaigns.
Peltier, an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribe and of Lakota and Dakota descent, was convicted of murdering FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams during a shootout on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota in June 1975.
Peltier was a leader of the American Indian Movement (AIM), an Indigenous civil rights movement founded in Minneapolis that was infiltrated and repressed by the FBI.
Now 78, Peltier is currently held in a maximum security prison in Coleman, Florida, where his health and mobility have significantly deteriorated since contracting Covid-19.
Amnesty International, who had observers at the original trial, is among a long list of advocates to call for Peltier’s release since his conviction in 1977 – including a group of UN arbitrary detention experts and the US attorney James Reynolds, whose team led the prosecution and appeal of Peltier’s case.
Earlier this year, former agent Coleen Rowley became the first FBI insider to call for clemency, after claiming that the agency’s stubborn opposition to Peltier’s release was driven by vindictiveness. The agency has continuously campaigned and protested against his parole and clemency.
Peltier is not eligible for parole again until 2024; the most recent petition for clemency was submitted by his legal team in 2021, but remains unresolved.
In an exclusive interview with the Guardian conducted via email in February, Peltier said: “Being free to me means being able to breathe freely away from the many dangers I live under in maximum custody prison. Being free would mean I could walk over a mile straight. It would mean being able to hug my grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”
