Biden commutes sentence for Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier, convicted in killing of FBI agents

WASHINGTON —  Just moments before leaving office, President Biden commuted the life sentence of Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier, who was convicted in the 1975 killings of two FBI agents.

Peltier was denied parole as recently as July and wasn’t eligible for parole again until 2026. He was serving life in prison for the deaths of the agents during a standoff on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He will transition to home confinement, Biden said in a statement.

Biden issued a record number of individual pardons and commutations. He announced on Friday that he was commuting the sentences of almost 2,500 people convicted of nonviolent drug offenses. He also gave a broad pardon for his son Hunter, who was prosecuted for gun and tax crimes.

Bureau of Prisons spokesperson Emery Nelson said after Biden’s commutation that Peltier remained incarcerated Monday at USP Coleman, a high-security prison in Florida.

The fight for Peltier’s freedom is entangled with the Indigenous rights movements. Nearly half a century later, his name remains a rallying cry.

An enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa in North Dakota, Peltier was active in the American Indian Movement, which began in the 1960s as a local organization in Minneapolis that grappled with issues of police brutality and discrimination against Native Americans. It quickly became a national force.

The movement grabbed headlines in 1973 when it took over the village of Wounded Knee on Pine Ridge — the Oglala Lakota Nation’s reservation — leading to a 71-day standoff with federal agents. Tensions between the movement and the government remained high for years.

On June 26, 1975, agents went to Pine Ridge to serve arrest warrants amid battles over Native treaty rights and self-determination.

After being injured in a shootout, agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams were shot in the head at close range, the FBI said. American Indian Movement member Joseph Stuntz was also killed in the shootout.

Two other movement members and Peltier’s co-defendants, Robert Robideau and Dino Butler, were acquitted of killing Coler and Williams.

After fleeing to Canada and being extradited to the United States, Peltier was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and was sentenced in 1977 to life in prison, despite defense claims that evidence against him had been falsified.

Biden’s action Monday followed decades of lobbying and protests on Peltier’s behalf by Native American leaders, human rights activists, liberal lawmakers and celebrities who maintain he was wrongfully convicted. Amnesty International has long considered Peltier a political prisoner. Advocates for his release have included Archbishop Desmond Tutu, civil rights icon Coretta Scott King, actor and director Robert Redford and musicians Pete Seeger, Harry Belafonte and Jackson Browne.

Law enforcement officers, former FBI agents, their families and prosecutors have strongly opposed a pardon or any reduction in Peltier’s sentence for just as long. Presidents Clinton and Obama rejected Peltier’s clemency requests, and he was denied parole in 1993, 2009 and 2024.

Shortly before Biden commuted Peltier’s sentence, the No Parole Peltier Assn. led by former FBI agents posted a statement celebrating the fact he hadn’t been pardoned.

“President Biden certainly recognized the unrepentant act of a cold-blooded murderer and denied Peltier’s clemency application,” the group posted before Biden commuted Peltier’s sentence. The group didn’t respond to a message seeking comment after Peltier’s sentence was commuted.

Peltier’s supporters pushed Biden to act because Peltier is 80 and has health problems, including diabetes, high blood pressure, heart trouble and an aortic aneurysm discovered in 2016, according to his lawyers. His backers worried that he would not get another chance at parole or a compassionate release before dying behind bars.

Biden on Sunday posthumously pardoned Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, who influenced Malcolm X and other civil rights leaders and was convicted of mail fraud in the 1920s. Also receiving pardons were a top Virginia lawmaker and advocates for immigrant rights, criminal justice reform and gun violence prevention.

Congressional leaders had pushed for Biden to pardon Garvey, with supporters arguing that Garvey’s conviction was politically motivated and an effort to silence the increasingly popular leader who spoke of racial pride. After Garvey was convicted, he was deported to Jamaica, where he was born. He died in 1940.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said of Garvey: “He was the first man, on a mass scale and level” to give millions of Black people “a sense of dignity and destiny.”

A pardon relieves a person of guilt and punishment. A commutation reduces or eliminates the punishment but doesn’t exonerate the wrongdoing.

Long and Miller write for the Associated Press.