In the last hours of his presidency, Joe Biden commuted the sentence of Leonard Peltier, the American Indian Movement elder who has spent nearly fifty years in federal prison for the 1975 deaths of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The commutation converts Peltier's two consecutive life sentences to home confinement beginning February 18. It is not a pardon: the 1977 conviction stands, and Peltier, who is 80 and in failing health, has maintained his innocence for all of those fifty years.
Peltier was convicted in 1977 of murdering FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams during the June 26, 1975 confrontation at Pine Ridge. Two other defendants, tried separately, were acquitted. His supporters have long challenged the evidence and conduct of the prosecution.
What surfaced afterward kept the case alive for five decades: a withheld ballistics report that undercut the government's trial theory, the government's concession on appeal that it could not prove who fired the fatal shots, and — extraordinarily — the emergence of the case's own prosecutor as a clemency advocate. James Reynolds, the former U.S. Attorney whose office handled Peltier's prosecution, wrote to President Biden that the government "was not able to prove that Mr. Peltier personally committed any offense" and that clemency was "in the best interest of justice."
The White House framed the commutation around Peltier's age, his deteriorating health — diabetes, an aortic aneurysm, partial blindness after a stroke in custody — and the extraordinary length of time already served. It came in the same week Biden commuted the sentences of nearly 2,500 people convicted of nonviolent drug offenses, at the close of a term that also included a broad pardon for his son.
The FBI Agents Association opposed clemency, as did former FBI director Christopher Wray. Their opposition continued even as Indigenous organizations and human-rights advocates pressed for release.
The National Congress of American Indians welcomed the commutation as a long-delayed act of justice for Indian Country, and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American cabinet secretary, wrote that Peltier's return home "signifies a measure of justice that has long evaded so many Native Americans for so many decades."
Peltier is expected to serve home confinement on the Turtle Mountain Reservation in Belcourt, North Dakota, where supporters have prepared a home for him.
