Native American activist and federal prisoner Leonard Peltier, who maintained his innocence in the murders of two FBI agents nearly half a century ago, is scheduled to appear Monday for a full parole hearing — his first in 15 years — because his supporters fear that he will not be able to obtain it. Another opportunity to plead for his release.
A lawyer for Peltier, 79, said he was “in good spirits” as he prepared for the hearing at the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex in Florida.
“He wants to go home and he recognizes that this is probably his last chance,” attorney Kevin Sharp said. “But it feels good to present the best case possible.”
Sharp said medical experts and reentry experts would be called in to support Peltier’s parole arguments, and that hearing examiners and the U.S. Parole Board would have letters from his community and from eminent personalities to examine.
Over the decades, human rights advocates and religious leaders, including Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama, as well as Nobel Peace Prize winners, such as Nelson Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu, supported Peltier’s release.
Besides the decades of scrutiny over how Peltier’s case was investigated and the conduct of his trial, Sharp said he believes his age, non-violent history in prison and his declining health, including diabetes, hypertension, partial blindness due to a stroke and bouts of Covid, should be taken into account when the board decides whether to grant parole.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons “is not saying he is a danger,” Sharp said. “It’s about the fact that they got enough retaliation,” he added of the federal government’s resistance to Peltier’s previous parole offers, given that the crime involved force agents. of the order.
At his 2009 parole hearing, an FBI official claimed that time had not lessened “the brutality of the crimes” and that although Peltier maintained his innocence, “he resorted to lies and half-truths in order to distract public attention from the facts.” at hand. »
Parole for Peltier, who was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences, would have only encouraged “lack of respect for the law,” Justice Department officials said at the time .
FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a statement Friday that the agency “remains resolute” in its opposition to Peltier’s release, citing how his appeals were rejected and he even escaped from a California prison in 1979 but was captured three days later.
“We must never forget or put aside that Peltier intentionally murdered these two young men and has never expressed remorse for his callous actions,” Wray said.
The arrest
On June 26, 1975, FBI agents Jack Coler and Ron Williams were on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota to arrest a man on a federal warrant in connection with the theft of cowboy boots, according to agency investigation files.
At the scene, the two men announced by radio that they had come under fire during a shootout that lasted 10 minutes, the FBI said. Both men were killed by bullets fired at close range. According to officials, Peltier – a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and later an activist with the American Indian Movement, a native rights group – was identified as the only person in possession of a weapon in the reserve that can shoot. the type of bullet that killed the officers.
But dozens of people had participated in the shooting; At trial, two co-defendants were acquitted after claiming self-defense. When Peltier was tried separately in 1977, no witnesses were presented to identify him as the shooter, and unbeknownst to his defense attorneys at the time, the federal government had withheld a ballistics report indicating that the fatal bullets did not come from his weapon. to the court documents filed by Peltier on appeal.
But the FBI maintained that his conviction was “justly and fairly obtained” and “withstood numerous appeals in multiple courts, including the United States Supreme Court.”
Yet other officials have spoken out in favor of him over the years. Retired federal prosecutor James Reynolds, who oversaw Peltier’s sentencing and post-trial appeals, wrote to President Joe Biden in 2021 asking him to commute Peltier’s sentence because it would “serve the best interests of justice and the best interests of our country.”
“He served more than 46 years based on minimal evidence, a result I highly doubt will be upheld in a court of law today,” Reynolds wrote.
Peltier, in a telephone interview from prison with NBC News in 2022, said he had hoped that growing pressure from Democratic members of Congress would convince Biden to grant him clemency and possibly allow him a new trial to prove his innocence.
“I have a few years left,” Peltier said, “and I have to fight.”
Parole Process
Peltier belongs to a small category of mostly elderly federal prisoners who committed their offenses before November 1987 and who are eligible to apply for parole through the Justice Department’s Parole Board. Congress eliminated federal parole for inmates who committed offenses after that date due to new sentencing guidelines.
At a hearing, an examiner is responsible for reviewing the inmate’s case and hearing from witnesses. The hearing examiner’s recommendation on whether to grant parole is forwarded to at least one other examiner who does not attend the hearing, and the final decision then rests with a parole commissioner – who is appointed by the president, confirmed by the Senate, and may be a former law enforcement official, educator, or attorney.
If the Parole Commissioner agrees with the examiners’ recommendation, it becomes the official decision. But if the first parole commissioners disagree, a second parole commissioner must agree with that commissioner or with the examiners.
Such a multi-layered process can appear detrimental to inmates if “the thread is lost,” said Charles Weisselberg, a Berkeley law professor who has written about the commission’s “dysfunction.”
Additionally, the Parole Board typically has five members, but it has only had two since around 2018, Weisselberg said.
The Senate has not yet decided whether to fill the committee’s vacant seats. Weisselberg said having fewer commissioners to deliberate gives “more power” to the hearing examiner and “from a practical standpoint, it virtually eliminates the right to a meaningful appeal in matters of release conditional”.
Weisselberg suggested the process could be streamlined with a magistrate judge as arbiter. The Parole Board did not return a request for comment.
Peltier’s supporters are hoping for parole but say Biden, who has not commented on the case, can still have him released on humanitarian grounds.
“Mr. Peltier deserves the dignity of living the rest of his life outside the confines of a federal prison cell,” said Rep. Raúl Grijalva, Democrat of Arizona, adding that “he is not too late to grant him the remaining years of a life that the federal government wrongly stole from him so many years ago.”