Leonard Peltier walked out of the United States Penitentiary at Coleman, Florida, on the morning of February 18 and boarded a plane to North Dakota. He is 80 years old. He had been in federal custody since 1976 — longer than any other prisoner associated with the American Indian Movement, and longer than almost any political prisoner in American history.
"Today I am finally free!" Peltier said in a statement released through the NDN Collective, the Indigenous advocacy organization that coordinated his homecoming. "They may have imprisoned me, but they never took my spirit."
His release completes the commutation President Biden signed in the final hours of his term on January 20. The commutation converted Peltier's two consecutive life sentences to home confinement; it did not vacate his 1977 conviction for the deaths of FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams during the June 1975 firefight on the Pine Ridge Reservation, and Peltier has never stopped asserting his innocence. He will serve the home-confinement term at Turtle Mountain, the reservation of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa in Belcourt, North Dakota, where supporters prepared a house for his return.
Hundreds of people lined the road into Belcourt to meet his motorcade, many on horseback, many carrying AIM flags. The welcome-home celebration filled the tribe's event center. Men and women who were children when he went inside stood in line to embrace him.
Forty-nine years
The case against Peltier has been contested for as long as it has existed. The affidavits used to extradite him from Canada came from a woman, Myrtle Poor Bear, who later recanted and said the FBI had coerced her; she was never called as a trial witness. A government ballistics test that undercut the prosecution's theory was withheld from the defense and surfaced only through a Freedom of Information Act request years later. At appeal, the government conceded it could not prove who fired the fatal shots. James Reynolds, the U.S. Attorney whose office handled the prosecution and appeal, spent his later years asking presidents to grant clemency, writing that the government "was not able to prove that Mr. Peltier personally committed any offense."
Amnesty International, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Coretta Scott King, and dozens of tribal nations called for his release across five decades. The FBI Agents Association opposed clemency to the end, and former FBI Director Christopher Wray urged President Biden in writing to deny it. Biden granted it anyway.
What comes home with him
Peltier returns in fragile health — diabetes, an aortic aneurysm, and partial blindness following a stroke in prison. Under the terms of the commutation he will live under home confinement, with movement outside the home subject to Bureau of Prisons approval.
He also returns as something no sentence could reach: the living center of a movement. For 49 years, "Free Leonard Peltier" was written on banners from Pine Ridge to Geneva. The banners can come down now. The questions his case raised — about COINTELPRO, about the FBI's war on the American Indian Movement, about what the government was willing to do to win a conviction — remain open, and they did not go home with him.
