The shocking wrongful conviction that led to the prosecutor urging clemency.
The Trial of Leonard Peltier
An American-Indian activist Leonard Peltier, who later became one of the most prominent advocates for the rights of North America’s native people until he was convicted of murdering two FBI agents in 1977. The anomalies in his conviction and prosecution made him famous among people, and they started calling Peltier a political prisoner.After leaving Flandreau Indian School in ninth grade, Leonard went to live with his father on the Turtle Mountain Reservation. The termination policy of the U.S. to cut off government funding and food for Native Americans on reservations to drive them into mainstream White culture inspired his activism. Peltier joined the radical civil rights group AIM in Denver at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s. Later in the mid-1970s, AIM and Peltier moved to South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
On June 26, 1975, to arrest a wanted robber Jimmy Eagle two FBI agents, Ronald Williams and Jack Colar, went to Jumping Bull Ranch, whose automobile was spotted by them. Members of AIM and Peltier were staying there. The occupants of the car, which the FBI suspected was owned by Eagle, opened fire on them. Joe Stuntz, an AIM member, was killed during the exchange of gunfire. Both FBI agents were also shot and died.
Darrell Dean Butler, Peltier, Robert Robideau, and Eagle were all present at the time of the gunfire and were charged with killing FBI officers. Eagle was subsequently acquitted. Peltier in the belief of not being fairly tried in the U.S. fled to Canada. While Robideau and Butler were prosecuted and acquitted by federal authorities.
A mentally ill woman, namely Myrtle Poor Bear, who was unable to testify at Peltier's trial, was a critical witness whose testimony led the Canadian police to arrest Peltier and deport him to the U.S. Peltier received two consecutive life sentences for first-degree murder in 1977.
Despite the continuous efforts of his attorneys to challenge the conviction of Peltier on the grounds of evidence fabrication, evidence suppression, judicial error, witness coercion, and U.S. government admission of fraudulent behavior, and despite the acknowledgment of the FBI that there were no witnesses to the FBI officers' killings, the pistol that fired the deadly shots was unknown, the car that took the agents to Jumping Bull was unknown, the courts kept denying the petition of a new trial after the conviction.
In 1979, Peltier was sent to California's Lompoc jail when he discovered that there was planning to "remove" him. Peltier allegedly fled Lompoc out of fear for his life but was caught again within a few days. On this act a sentence of seven years was added to his life sentence but was eventually overturned. He was sent to the Leavenworth prison in 1985. Beginning in 2005, Peltier was transferred between federal correctional facilities, first to Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and then to Coleman, Florida.
Peltier had two parole petitions turned down by the Parole Commission of the U.S. in 1993 and 2009. In 2019, Peltier's legal team asked for a presidential pardon for their client, despite the Department of Justice's refusal to revive the case in 2016, and he still stays in prison.