Native American activist Leonard Peltier released from prison

Leonard Peltier, a Native American rights activist held for nearly half a century for the killing of two FBI agents, was released from a federal prison in Central Florida on Tuesday morning.

Peltier, 80, will serve the remainder of his two life sentences in home confinement in North Dakota, where he is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa.

The commutation of Peltier’s sentence was one of former President Joe Biden’s final acts before leaving office. Those urging clemency for Peltier, who is in poor health and partially blind, included Nobel Peace laureates, former law enforcement officials including one of the lead prosecutors on the case, human rights organizations and celebrities like Steven Van Zandt, the guitarist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band.

FBI agents including Christopher Wray, the former director of the agency, strongly opposed clemency for Peltier, saying that it was a betrayal of the fallen agents, Jack Coler and Ronald Williams. Wray called Peltier “a remorseless killer.”

He was convicted of his role in a shootout between activists and FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1975 that left two agents and an activist dead. Prosecutors said the agents were shot at point-blank range.

Peltier has admitted to firing his gun from a distance, but insisted that he acted in self-defense and did not kill the agents.

Of the more than 30 people who were present during the shootout, Peltier was the only one to be convicted of a crime. Two other Native American activists were tried for murder but were acquitted. Exculpatory evidence admitted in their trials, including ballistic evidence, was excluded from Peltier’s, which his supporters argue was one of the ways his trial was unfair.

An appeals court found in 1986 that the government had deliberately withheld evidence but said that evidence would most likely not have changed the verdict.

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