Leonard Peltier — Anishinaabe / Lakota American Indian Movement member, convicted in 1977 of the murders of FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams during the June 26, 1975 Oglala firefight at Pine Ridge, after a trial whose prosecutorial conduct has been condemned by Amnesty International, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, the National Congress of American Indians, the European Parliament, the Dalai Lama, Pope Francis, and dozens of U.S. members of Congress — was denied parole again on July 2, 2024.
The hearing
Peltier's June 10, 2024 parole hearing — his first since 2009 — was held at USP Coleman I, the Florida federal penitentiary where he has been confined since 2011. He is in failing health. He is diabetic, partially blind, has had an aortic aneurysm, and contracted COVID-19 twice in custody. He uses a walker.
The U.S. Parole Commission issued its decision on July 2: parole denied; reconsideration in fifteen years — i.e., 2039, when Peltier, if alive, would be 95. (The commission later corrected this to a 2026 reconsideration window.) The grounds cited were familiar: the seriousness of the offense, and the commission's assessment that Peltier had not sufficiently expressed remorse for the deaths of Agents Coler and Williams.
The case the government will not reexamine
The strength of the federal case against Peltier has been the subject of essentially uninterrupted critique for nearly fifty years. The ballistics evidence that purported to tie his rifle to the bullets that killed the agents was, on the government's own subsequent admission, more equivocal than the prosecution presented at trial. Cooperating witness Myrtle Poor Bear, whose affidavits the government used to extradite him from Canada, was later shown to have not been at Pine Ridge that day — a fact the FBI and DOJ concealed at the time of extradition. The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, in Peltier v. Henman, acknowledged that the government had withheld 6,000 pages of FBI material from the defense and held that, had defense counsel possessed that material, the outcome of the trial might have differed. The court denied a new trial anyway. The government has never since reopened the case.
What the parole denial actually was
The Parole Commission's July 2024 denial was not a finding that Peltier remained a danger to society. It was, on its face, an assessment that he had not sufficiently expressed remorse. Peltier has maintained his innocence for 48 years. The federal government's position is that he must confess to crimes he denies committing in order to be released. That is not parole. That is a condition the U.S. parole system imposes on political prisoners and almost no one else.
The road to clemency
The July 2024 denial galvanized the clemency push that had been quietly building inside the Biden administration's last year. Amnesty International, the NDN Collective, the Indigenous Environmental Network, dozens of tribal governments, and a bipartisan group of former federal prosecutors (including James H. Reynolds, the U.S. Attorney whose office prosecuted Peltier in 1977 and who has since publicly called for his release) intensified the campaign through fall 2024. On January 20, 2025, on his last day in office, President Biden commuted Peltier's sentence to home confinement. Peltier returned to the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota. The federal conviction was not vacated, the case was not reopened, and the FBI's institutional opposition to his release remains the federal position. But after 49 years he came home.
July 2, 2024 is the day that did not work — the parole denial that, in retrospect, was the federal system's final closure of the orderly route. Clemency was the route that was left.
