By Mordecai Specktor
Biden commutes Peltier’s sentence
In one of his last official acts, on Jan. 20, Pres. Joe Biden commuted the prison sentence of Leonard Peltier, who has been serving two consecutive life terms for the murder of two FBI agents on June 26, 1975, during a shootout at Oglala, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation (So. Dakota).
Peltier and those working for his release over the past five decades hailed the decision to move the American Indian Movement (AIM) activist from prison to home confinement. Peltier is suffering from a number of medical conditions that have worsened in recent years. He will leave prison on Feb. 18, according to press reports.
My correspondence with Leonard, starting in 1978, spurred my involvement in Indian issues. I helped organize a Twin Cities chapter of the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee and wrote a history of the case that was published as a pamphlet by the national office.
In 1980, I traveled with the late Dick Bancroft, photographic chronicler of significant AIM events, to the federal prison near Marion, Illinois. The prison tucked away in the hills of southern Illinois resembled a research laboratory. At the time, it was dubbed the “new Alcatraz,” the top-level prison in the federal system. A guard watching the driveway to the prison asked over a squawk box if Robert Redford was with us; the famed actor had visited Peltier a few months earlier. Redford narrated the 1992 documentary “Incident at Oglala,” directed by Michael Apted.
That was my first visit with Leonard, who seemed like many of the AIM activists I’d met previously; but through a gross miscarriage of justice, his case had become an international cause célèbre. Apart from Redford, other Hollywood and rock world stars supported his case. Officials in the Soviet Union gathered 10 million signatures on petitions seeking Peltier’s freedom, as his imprisonment became a gambit in Cold War politics. Amnesty International and other human rights groups pointed to FBI and prosecutorial misconduct in the legal proceedings.
I again saw Peltier in 1984, when he was present at an evidentiary hearing in Bismarck, North Dakota. Famed civil rights lawyer William Kunstler argued Leonard’s case, regarding a dispute over firearms evidence that purportedly tied Leonard to a rifle, the “murder weapon,” that had been recovered from a burned up car on the Wichita turnpike.
The Peltier case has taken numerous twists and turns since he fled Oglala after the shootout, and was arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police at a camp in Alberta, Canada, in 1976. The FBI used perjured affidavits from an Indian woman, Myrtle Poor Bear, to gain Peltier’s extradition from Canada. While locked up in California, another inmate warned Peltier of a murder plot against him, which prompted a prison escape. He was out for a few days and then recaptured.
In 1985, I traveled again with Dick Bancroft for another prison interview with Leonard, this time at the federal medical center in Springfield, Missouri. Leonard was relaxed and talkative, and grateful for the press attention to his case. I have written about Leonard’s case in this column over the years. Truthfully, I expected that the FBI would get its way and Leonard would die in prison.
In a statement released by the NDN Collective in January, Leonard said, “It’s finally over — I’m going home. 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.”
Leonard will return to his home reservation, Turtle Mountain (No. Dakota), according to reports.
And in a phone call with members of the NDN Collective, who gathered outside the federal prison at Coleman, Florida, where Leonard has been confined, he thanked his supporters in Indian Country and around the world. He said that “home confinement is going to be a million times better than what I’m living in.”
Finally, Leonard is going home.
Cruelty and chaos with Trump 2.0 regime
Since Jan. 20, the second presidential inauguration of Trump, the news has been flooded with one crazy thing after another. It’s difficult to focus on what will emerge from the chaos in Washington. It looks like Trump and his oligarchs, Musk, et al., are attempting to capture the state, as Viktor Orban, the authoritarian leader of Hungary, has done.
The mass deportation scheme has frightened millions of undocumented residents of the U.S. And as I expected, U.S. citizens are being detained by ICE police. Navajo tribal officials have complained that some of their citizens have been detained and questioned by ICE agents.
I found a similar situation, in 1982, on a visit to the Mexican border, where members of the Tohono O’odham Nation, on the U.S. side of the border, told me that they had been hassled by border patrol agents, accused of being illegal aliens.
We need to stand against the fascist tide that is sweeping across the country.
