Returning home, after nearly half a century

Elderly and ailing American Indian Movement prisoner Leonard Peltier is going home to friends, family, and essential medical care

Mugshot from public records obtained by Peltier’s lawyers. Coloring and typography by Kalen Goodluck.

In mid-January, at the last possible minute, on the morning of Donald Trump’s inauguration into his second presidency, then-President Joseph Biden commuted the sentence of Indigenous political prisoner and American Indian Movement (AIM) activist Leonard Peltier, who is serving two consecutive life sentences having been convicted of killing two FBI agents in a shoot out in 1975 during an FBI paramilitary offensive. Peltier, who is 80 and has numerous debilitating health problems, has maintained his innocence since the discriminatory, unethical, and unfair federal trial found him guilty.

On June 26, 1975, two civilian-clothed FBI agents in an unmarked car stalked a pickup truck heading toward Jumping Bull ranch in Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, where a handful of AIM activists were meeting, including Peltier. The two agents were supposedly there to serve a warrant for assault and stolen cowboy boots, yet a team of 150 FBI agents, BIA police, and a Native vigilante group were close by. In reality, the FBI was preparing for war with AIM, having composed an internal memo two months prior entitled “The use of special agents of the FBI in a paramilitary law enforcement operation in the Indian Country.” Shots were heard across the ranch, from who is still debated, and was soon followed by a barrage of bullets. When the smoke cleared, FBI agents Ronald Williams and Jack Coler were dead, supposedly shot in the head at close range. Coeur d’Alene Tribal member Joe Stuntz was also shot in the head, killed at age 23. Despite no credible witnesses or damming forensic evidence, Peltier was convicted of the double murder of the FBI agents.

“It should not have taken nearly 50 years later and an action of the president to get this fixed,” said Jenipher Jones, an attorney who represents Leonard Peltier at For the People Legal. There needs to be a “legal remedy” for Peltier, she said. “While I’m so grateful, beyond grateful that Leonard has received his commutation, it still has fallen short with the time it has taken. There should have been intervention long ago.”

Outside, hundreds of miles away, Peltier’s legal team is preparing for his release from Coleman prison in Florida to his home in Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa reservation in Belcourt, North Dakota. “Leonard, most importantly, has an amazing group of medical professionals” waiting for him, according to Jones, including a psychotherapist who specializes in Indigenous spirituality and healing, a medical internist, and internist Dr. Ricardo Alvarez, who treats the political prisoner and Black Panther Party activist Mumia Abu-Jamal who is 70 years old and is also serving life in prison. “I am looking forward to the moment he can get some relief, physical relief out of his pain,” Jones told No Frontiers over the phone.

Two days after he received news of his clemency, Peltier got to speak for ten minutes with his legal team, and he is still waiting to hear from prison officials about when he will be released. Over the phone, Peltier expressed his excitement and disbelief toward his commutation, relayed his wishes for his homecoming, and, perhaps most importantly, discussed the medical team’s readiness to examine and treat Peltier’s poor health that was aggravated by his treatment and conditions at Coleman. As Peltier’s internal medicine doctor has observed, “It’s clear from Leonard’s time in the Bureau of Prisons that it has been long-standing decades-long neglect,” said Jones.

As of writing, the elderly and diabetic Peltier remains incarcerated at USP Coleman I, a maximum security prison in Florida, as inmate #89637-132. Coleman is notorious for its inhumane widespread use of “lockdowns” of inmates, akin to solitary confinement for weeks, even months on end, that Jones says further deteriorated Peltier’s physical health. In lockdown, inmates lose access to any semblance of a routine, the everyday scheduled busyness, recreation, socializing, and essential mental and physical stimulation outside their otherwise caged existence. According to reporting from Truthout in February 2024, across the country, “Prison lockdowns have intensified in both duration and levels of abuse and deprivation over the years.” Inmates in lockdown are denied exercise, given showers at irregular and infrequent times, barred from sending or receiving telephone calls, and miss programming like occupation education, vocational training, apprenticeships, library services, commissary shopping, and visits from attorneys or loved ones. One inmate at USP Coleman told Truthout that prisoners spent more time caged in their cells than outside of them in 2023.

For years, Peltier suffered without a CPAP machine for his sleep apnea, which the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) finally provided, yet his cramped concrete cell didn’t have electrical outlets to plug in the device, leaving his airway continuously at risk while he slept. Untreated sleep apnea can increase risks of heart disease, heart attack, high blood pressure, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and cognitive impairment. He is also missing much of his teeth. He hasn’t been able to see a dentist to receive prosthetics, thoroughly hindering his ability to eat his prison meals of peanut butter and bologna sandwiches. His eyesight is highly impaired, with cataracts and blindness in one eye.

To top it off, in January 2016, Peltier was diagnosed with an abdominal aortic aneurysm, a potentially fatal bulge in the wall of the body’s main artery that feeds into the heart, which has grown in size since diagnosis and likely needs surgery. These bulges can burst or split, which can produce life-threatening internal bleeding or block the flow of blood from the heart to various organs. “Now, thankfully, Leonard will be able to see medical providers who can give us an accurate diagnosis and a remedy to his situation to give him the level of care he deserves,” said Jones.

A multigenerational global campaign

Indigenous activists pushed hard for clemency for the ailing AIM activist during the final months of Biden’s presidency—perhaps just in time. Trump has begun the Project 2025 agenda: signing an unprecedented series of racist executive orders and initiating an aggressive re-organization of the federal government, like purging career bureaucrats in favor of loyalist foot soldiers, all of which have untold implications for tribal sovereignty and Indian rights. As No Frontiers has previously reported, Trump’s authoritarian playbook Project 2025 is well underway and has Indian Country in its crosshairs, threatening assimilationist policies, essential funding for Indian programs and services, and the cultural survival of tribal nations. The Trump administration, on its face, appears unmoved by tribal and Indigenous interests.

“I think in some ways people really want to pat Biden on the back,” said Nick Estes, historian, author, and professor at the University of Minnesota. “Leonard Peltier, his going home in this moment in time, to the commutation of his sentence, to home confinement is a result of five decades of campaigning for his release. I don’t know if Biden gets to claim that victory.”

For nearly half a century, hundreds of tribal leaders, legendary human rights advocates like Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Coretta Scott King and the late Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, Rigoberta Menchú Tum, former U.S. attorney James Reynolds whose office put Peltier in prison, members of congress, international watchdog organizations like Amnesty International, United Nations working groups, and many more have all urged presidential administration after administration to grant the AIM activist Leonard Peltier clemency. Even nineteen million people of the Soviet Union Russian sent letters to the White House, including four Nobel Prize winners, supporting the release of the AIM activist. Peltier even sought political asylum in the Soviet Union, which was calling for his release. His list of prominent and esteemed supporters goes on.

Although he did show a healthy commitment to tribal sovereignty as president, Joe Biden never supported Peltier as a senator, vice president, or president. At the tail end of his re-election campaign, Biden issued a formal apology for the U.S. Indian boarding school system and its generational traumatic, cultural, and genocidal impacts on tribes and Indian children. At age nine, Peltier was taken away from his grandmother, who spoke little English and was forcefully taken to Wahpeton Indian Boarding School in North Dakota, as thousands of Native children were for about a century. Many would never come home, dying at school. As he recalled for Native News Online, when he saw the white BIA official drive up to the house, he forgot to run and hide in the home as his grandparents taught him. He would stay there, sustaining frequent beatings and terror from school staff until age 12. “It’s like his incarceration began when he was a child, you know, by the hands of this country,” said Estes.

While groups campaigned for his release, Peltier’s lawyers spent a lot of their time digging for documents on his case, sending public records requests to every FBI field office in the nation. What they found was immense: a gargantuan trove of documents withheld from Peltier’s trial and defense team. “What we learned was this: that there were 142,579 pages of material relating to Leonard Peltier and the RESMURS investigation, which stood for ‘reservation murders.’ And that number is quite interesting because at the time Leonard was tried in 1977, the government merely turned over 3,500 pages of material and said, ‘Hey, this is all we have,’” said Michael Kuzma, an attorney based in Buffalo, NY who spent over a decade representing Peltier. “So theoretically, the prosecution is supposed to turn over all this material, exculpatory material.”

Peltier’s lawyers first uncovered 18,000 pages of withheld documents in 1979 through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, of which 6,000 pages were still denied from public disclosure through law enforcement and national security exemptions. At that time, his attorneys discovered some remarkable evidence. “Leonard’s attorneys learned that there was a ballistics report that showed that the weapon linked to Leonard Peltier couldn’t have possibly been used to shoot the two agents,” said Kuzma.

In 2001, Kuzma and others on Peltier’s legal team filed FOIA complaints to the FBI, CIA, and the Department of Justice, continuing to press the government to release the thousands of pages first requested in the 1970s. “We learned that there were, you know, there weren't 3500 pages or 18,000 pages; there were well over 142,000 pages, and many of those pages are still being withheld on various grounds,” said Kuzma, who argued before a three-judge panel for the full release of documents. As a result of this lawsuit, Peltier’s team learned the FBI possesses 142,579 pages. In 2007, the court refused to order the FBI to release these documents, who argued the documents could impede the nation’s war on “transnational terrorism”—which seemed preposterous to Kuzma because the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center had nothing to do with Peltier, American Indian Movement, or this century.

Nick Estes, author of “Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance,” wrote a more comprehensive account of Leonard Peltier’s freedom campaign for Jacobin in March 2023, detailing the American Indian Movement’s activism for Native rights, the events leading up to the ambush by the militarized FBI, the trial of Peltier, and the half-century-long global struggle for justice in Peltier’s imprisonment. But now, he will finally walk out those doors and enter a new chapter in his life.

The world outside

When Peltier learned of his commuted sentence, he immediately called NDN Collective’s Nick Tilsen, who was parked outside the prison in Florida. He only had two minutes to speak, using them to thank the unwavering tribal and international support he had received over the decades. Then, time ran out.

Leonard Peltier’s commutation by Biden happened during the final possible minutes before then-president-elect Donald Trump was sworn into office. Peltier’s lawyer, Jenipher Jones, actually felt confident Trump’s administration would have been amenable to granting him clemency. Without disclosing how she knew, Jones didn’t feel a Trump presidency would deny Peltier clemency as many felt after his election. Peltier’s former lawyer, Michael Kuzma, felt similarly optimistic. Still, Trump’s anti-Indian policy agenda his first few days was almost instantaneous. When Trump stepped into office, a chaotic storm of actions and executive orders blew across the nation, catching seemingly everyone off guard.

During a confirmation hearing for Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee for FBI director, Senator Dick Durbin asked Patel, “Is America safer because the 1,600 [January 6^th insurrectionists] people were given an opportunity to come out of serving their sentences and live in our communities again?”

Patel sidestepped the question by saying he has not reviewed all 1,600 cases to comment on them, instead stating, “I have always advocated for imprisoning those who cause harm to our law enforcement and civilian communities. I also believe America is not safer because of President Biden’s commutation of a man who murdered two FBI agents. Agent Coler and William’s family deserve better than the man who, at point blank range, fired a shotgun into their heads and murdered them—released from prison. It goes both ways.”

Source: X

“Leonard Peltier is the epitome of evil and should have died in prison for his heinous crimes,” wrote Patel the day after Peltier’s commutation. “I will pray for the families of FBI Agents Jack Coler, Ronald Williams, and all the families of fallen law enforcement officers who continue to bear the pain of losing their loved ones in the line of duty.” The law enforcement and intelligence agency has long opposed Peltier’s release, even after it came to light that the FBI coerced witnesses and withheld and falsified evidence during Peltier’s misconduct-riddled trial. In an interview published in The Guardian in January 2023, retired FBI agent Coleen Rowley, who has worked closely with prosecutors who tried Peltier’s case, said the FBI’s opposition to Peltier’s release is driven by “retribution” and “misplaced loyalties” and that he should be released due to his health, age, and inordinately long sentence.

“Even the government now admits that the theory it presented against Mr. Peltier at trial was not true,” wrote Don Edwards, former California congressman and ex-FBI agent, in a letter of support for clemency in December 2000. “The FBI continues to deny its improper conduct on Pine Ridge during the 1970’s and in the trial of Peltier,” he added. It came out later that the FBI threatened a witness for the prosecution to give falsified evidence. “The FBI used Mr. Peltier as a scapegoat and they continue to do so today.”

Political prisoners like Peltier and Mumia Abu-Jamal were directly targeted by the FBI, state, and local police because of their work in racial liberation movements during the 60s and 70s that threatened institutional and national white supremacy within the country, often infiltrating, surveilling, and even assassinating them. Peltier and Abu-Jamal are among a group of about 150 “old law” federal prisoners, political prisoners from that era of liberation movements who were convicted before Nov. 1, 1987, when federal sentencing guidelines went into effect. These elderly and often ailing “old law” prisoners are ineligible for compassionate release and are forced to rely solely upon receiving parole.

Apart from the celebrations and ceremonies arranged by Peltier’s family and friends, there are still questions regarding how his “home confinement” condition of release, which takes effect Feb. 18, will be established and enforced. Otherwise, the prison will be the first to observe and carry out Peltier’s release. According to Jones, it may take a few days for Peltier to be processed for his release, as other inmates are also being released in mid-February.

After 49 years in prison, speaking with Peltier’s lawyer and former lawyer Jenipher Jones and Michael Kuzma, it’s clear “Leonard” (as they call him) has kept his spirit, hope, and sense of humor intact. Yet the elderly AIM activist is re-entering a country under a presidential administration that is once again hostile to tribal sovereignty and Indigenous peoples, both domestically and internationally, criminalizing them as “terrorists” and extremists just as they had when he was active in Native liberation. Soon, he will get to meet with his loved ones and his medical, psychological, and spiritual team, who are waiting for him. For now, he waits in Coleman prison.