CNN —
In one of his last acts before leaving office, former President Joe Biden commuted the life sentence of Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier, convicted in the 1975 killings of two FBI agents.
Peltier, 80, will serve the remainder of his sentence at home.
“It’s finally over – I’m going home,” Peltier said in a statement shared by NDN Collective, an Indigenous rights group in South Dakota. “I want to show the world I’m a good person with a good heart. I want to help the people, just like my grandmother taught me.”
Peltier was denied parole last year. He has spent almost 50 years – more than half of his life – in federal prison.
A statement from Biden’s office noted Peltier’s “severe health ailments” as well as “his close ties to and leadership in the Native American community.” The commutation does not pardon him for his crimes, his office said.
Peltier consistently maintained his innocence in the agents’ shooting deaths. Jack Coler and Ronald Williams, were killed in a shootout June 26, 1975, while searching for a robbery suspect on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
The agents went to the reservation to serve arrest warrants, the AP reported, and were injured in the shootout and later shot in the head, the FBI has said.
In 1977, Peltier was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to two consecutive life terms.
“I didn’t kill those agents, I didn’t see who killed those agents, and if I did know, I’m not telling. But I don’t know. That’s the point,” Peltier told former CNN correspondent Mark Potter in 1999.
Peltier said he fired shots during the gun battle but “I know I didn’t hit them. I know I didn’t.”
The FBI Agents Association said in a Monday statement they were “outraged” by the commutation of Peltier’s sentence and described him as “a convicted cop killer responsible for the brutal murders” of Coler and Williams.
The commutation is a “cruel betrayal to the families and colleagues of these fallen Agents and is a slap in the face of law enforcement,” the association said.
Peltier is currently incarcerated at the United States Penitentiary Coleman I in Sumterville, Florida. Peltier’s commutation to home confinement goes into effect on February 18.
The Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians has a furnished home waiting for Peltier’s arrival, Kevin Sharp, a retired federal judge and attorney who represented Peltier in his bids for clemency, told CNN.
“Leonard has always wanted to live out the rest of his life at home, at Turtle Mountain,” Sharp said. “He will now get to do that, spending that time with his kids and grandkids and fellow members of his tribe.”
Human and Indigenous rights groups, many of which had supported Peltier’s repeated bids for clemency, applauded Biden’s actions.
The National Congress of American Indians celebrated the commutation in a statement, saying the case “has long symbolized the systemic injustices faced by Indigenous Peoples.”
Paul O’Brien, the executive director of Amnesty International USA, said in a statement Biden was right to commute Peltier’s sentence “given the serious human rights concerns about the fairness of his trial.”
Sens. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, and Bernie Sanders, an Independent from Vermont, were among several lawmakers who asked Biden to commute Peltier’s sentence in 2023. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention had called for his release in 2022.
James Reynold, the US attorney whose office prosecuted Peltier, became an advocate for Peltier and called for clemency in a 2021 letter to Biden. He wrote that Peltier’s conviction and incarceration were “testament to a time and a system of justice that no longer has a place in our society.”
Advocates have also noted Peltier attended one of the hundreds of US boarding schools funded by the federal government to assimilate Indigenous children into White society in the 19th and 20th centuries.
In a first-person account published by Native News Online, Peltier said he was forcibly taken from his grandmother to a North Dakota boarding school when he was 9 years old. He wrote the staff “made it clear we were hated” at the school.
NDN Collective previously described Peltier as “America’s longest serving Indigenous political prisoner.”
In the 1970s, Peltier was a leader of the American Indian Movement, which took over the village of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation, the Associated Press reported.
The takeover led to a 71-day standoff with federal agents and lasting tensions between the movement and the government. During the occupation, a US Marshal was shot, resulting in paralysis, and two Indigenous activists were shot and killed, the AP reported.
The FBI’s account of the 1975 shootout says that Coler and Williams were at the Pine Ridge reservation searching for Jimmy Eagle, who had an outstanding federal warrant for robbery.
The agents’ radio transmissions indicate they stopped a red and white vehicle and then reported the occupants of the vehicle were preparing to shoot at them.
Other agents who arrived to respond also came under gunfire, the FBI said.
Coler and Williams’ bodies showed they were both injured by gunshots – Coler in the arm, Williams in the foot – before being shot in the head. The agents’ vehicles contained a total of 125 bullet holes, according to the FBI.
Joseph Stuntz, another member of the American Indian Movement, was also killed that day, according to Amnesty International. No one has been arrested or charged in his death.
Peltier previously told CNN he was in bed at camp when he heard gunshots.
“All of a sudden, everybody said, ‘Man, we’re being attacked. We’re being attacked,’” he told CNN in 1999. “So I grabbed an old rifle and started running up to the house.”
Peltier said he fired his gun after being fired upon. The FBI has said the agents were shot without provocation.
The government built its case on ballistics evidence and witness accounts from people who were on the periphery of the shootout, including Native Americans, but no one actually saw the killings.
Supporters of Peltier have said the evidence produced at trial was unreliable, while the FBI has categorically denied it fabricated evidence or coerced witnesses.
