Amnesty International Urges Biden To Release Leonard Peltier Before Leaving Office

WASHINGTON ― Native American rights activist Leonard Peltier, who has been in prison for nearly 50 years, is turning 80 on Thursday ― and Amnesty International USA is appealing to Joe Biden to finally release him before his presidency comes to an end.

Peltier “was recently denied parole and compassionate release by the US Parole Commission and the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) respectively,” reads a Sept. 4 letter to Biden from Paul O’Brien, the group’s executive director.

“As President of the United States, you have the opportunity to rectify a case that has long troubled human rights advocates and Indigenous Peoples worldwide,” O’Brien wrote.

Peltier has been in prison since the U.S. government put him there in the 1970s. He was convicted for the murder of two FBI agents during a 1975 shootout on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, and was given two consecutive life sentences.

But there was never evidence that Peltier killed anyone. His trial featured astounding levels of misconduct , including federal prosecutors hiding exculpatory evidence and abruptly changing their charge to aiding and abetting after someone found the evidence they’d hidden.

The FBI never did figure out who killed those agents; the federal prosecutor in Peltier’s case, Lynn Crooks, later admitted as much . But the U.S. government needed someone to go to prison. Peltier ― a member of the American Indian Movement, a grassroots Indigenous activist group the FBI was targeting ― was one of dozens of people present at the shootout, and was the only person left to go after. He was separated from his co-defendants, all of whom had been acquitted on grounds of self-defense, and was found guilty.

As the years have rolled by, Peltier’s imprisonment has