Leonard Peltier was extradited from Canada on the strength of affidavits from Myrtle Poor Bear — a woman the government knew was not present at Oglala and who recanted, saying the FBI had coerced her — and convicted at Fargo, North Dakota, in 1977 of the agents' murders, receiving two consecutive life sentences. The trial excluded most of the self-defense evidence heard at Cedar Rapids; years later the government conceded it could not prove who shot the agents, and ballistics documents withheld from the defense undercut the case's physical evidence.
Amnesty International, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a U.S. Attorney who prosecuted him, and dozens of parliaments and tribunals called for his release across five decades in which parole was repeatedly denied. On January 19, 2025, President Biden commuted his sentence to home confinement, and Peltier — by then 80 and gravely ill — returned to the Turtle Mountain reservation that February.