Plea for executive clemency for POW Peltier being heard

The United States' longest war wasn't in Afghanistan; it was against Indigenous Americans and ran from about 1785 to at least 1973. Leonard Peltier is a prisoner of that war. 

In 1974, President Richard Nixon issued a limited presidential pardon to convicted killer William Calley of My Lai Massacre fame after he and American troops, some under his command, raped and butchered some 500 unarmed Vietnamese people in 1968. 

Leonard Peltier is guilty of far, far lesser offenses.

After being convicted in 1977 then sentenced to two life terms for being present at the killing of two enemy combatants under the fog of war on a battlefield inside the Oglala Lakota Nation in occupied South Dakota in 1975. Peltier applied for compassionate release in 2018 and again in 2020 but was always denied because Donald Trump despises American Indians. 

In a letter dated April 24, 2021 former New Mexico US Representative from the Third District Deb Haaland now Secretary of the Interior and Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ, 3rd District) asked Pres. Joe Biden for a grant of clemency and the release of Peltier, a 78-year old tribal citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians.

Our Lady of the Arroyo and her man watched Thunderheart again last night; it's a film that reminds viewers just how fucked up the American justice system and the Federal Bureau of Investigation can be. This interested party believes Pres. Barack Obama feared Peltier would be murdered by white nationalists if he’s released.

As far back as 1886, in US v Kagama, the Supreme Court noted that the state in which they reside is the “deadliest enemy” a tribe has. It is unlikely the justices would have made mention of this in a noted decision were it not an inherently relevant aspect of any tribe’s relationship to a state. An attempt was made by the state of South Dakota in 1964 to pass a referendum that would have established state jurisdiction within reservation boundaries but when the South Dakota Supreme Court ruled the state would have to assume all jurisdictional responsibility, not just police the roads, the tribal sovereignty-hostile proponents of the state-wide referendum had to scramble like mad to defeat their own referendum, which they did. [Creeping jurisdiction is a real threat to Indian Country]

Peltier has six surviving children and his eldest son, Chauncey is co-founder of the Indigenous Rights Center in Albuquerque but lives in Portland, Oregon. Efforts led by the Democratic National Committee's Native American Caucus to convince the Biden White House to grant clemency are ongoing.

But Peltier is not in prison for murder. The government could not justify a murder case, so it switched gears and today Leonard Peltier is Inmate #89637-132 serving at the United States Penitentiary, Coleman, in central Florida, on charges of “aiding and abetting” the murder of federal officers, plus a seven-year sentence for an escape attempt. Indeed Peltier has already served a longer sentence than most principals in murder convictions. There is no way to look at the evidence and come away with any conclusion other than Peltier is being punished for crimes that could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. [Mark Trahant, Leonard Peltier's 46 years in prison: ‘What else do you want?’]