In the last hours of his presidency, Joe Biden commuted the sentence of Leonard Peltier, the American Indian Movement elder who has spent nearly fifty years in federal prison for the 1975 deaths of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The commutation converts Peltier's two consecutive life sentences to home confinement beginning February 18. It is not a pardon: the 1977 conviction stands, and Peltier, who is 80 and in failing health, has maintained his innocence for all of those fifty years.
The decision ends, without resolving, one of the longest-contested prosecutions in modern American history. Peltier was convicted of murdering agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams during the June 26, 1975 firefight at the Jumping Bull ranch — a shootout that unfolded in the middle of the "reign of terror" years on Pine Ridge, when AIM members and traditionalist Oglala families were being killed at a rate that made the reservation the most dangerous place in America. Two co-defendants tried separately, Dino Butler and Bob Robideau, were acquitted on self-defense grounds. Peltier, extradited from Canada on affidavits the government's own witness later said the FBI coerced from her, was tried alone, under a different judge, and convicted.
What surfaced afterward kept the case alive for five decades: a withheld ballistics report that undercut the government's trial theory, the government's concession on appeal that it could not prove who fired the fatal shots, and — extraordinarily — the emergence of the case's own prosecutor as a clemency advocate. James Reynolds, the former U.S. Attorney whose office handled Peltier's prosecution, wrote to President Biden that the government "was not able to prove that Mr. Peltier personally committed any offense" and that clemency was "in the best interest of justice."
The decision and the opposition
The White House framed the commutation around Peltier's age, his deteriorating health — diabetes, an aortic aneurysm, partial blindness after a stroke in custody — and the extraordinary length of time already served. It came in the same week Biden commuted the sentences of nearly 2,500 people convicted of nonviolent drug offenses, at the close of a term that also included a broad pardon for his son.
Law enforcement organizations fought the decision to the last day. Former FBI Director Christopher Wray wrote to Biden that "granting Peltier any relief from his conviction or sentence is wholly unjustified," and the FBI Agents Association condemned the commutation as an affront to the agents' families. That opposition — sustained, institutional, and unbroken across ten presidencies — is a large part of why every previous clemency push failed, including the one President Obama declined in 2017.
Home
The National Congress of American Indians welcomed the commutation as a long-delayed act of justice for Indian Country, and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American cabinet secretary, wrote that Peltier's return home "signifies a measure of justice that has long evaded so many Native Americans for so many decades."
A house is waiting for him on the Turtle Mountain Reservation in Belcourt, North Dakota, where he is an enrolled member. His son Chauncey has spent years telling reporters that all his father wanted was to die at home rather than in a federal cell. On February 18, for the first time since Gerald Ford was president, Leonard Peltier will sleep in one.
