- by William Briggs
- The Guardian
- Issue #2131
Photo: Gary Stevens – flickr.com (CC BY 2.0)
Joe Biden’s last days in the White House saw him issue pardons to many Americans serving prison sentences. He commuted death sentences and freed hundreds of inmates serving sentences for relatively minor offences. Why it took so long for a conscience to kick in is an unanswered question. One name, above all others stands out in the Biden list. That name is Leonard Peltier.
This man has been in prison for nearly 48 years. He is America’s longest serving political prisoner. He has not been pardoned but has had his sentence commuted to ‘indefinite’ house imprisonment.
Peltier is a native American activist who was sentenced to two life sentences for shooting two FBI agents in 1975. He has always denied the killings but admitted to being present when the FBI agents engaged with a protest action at the Pine Ridge Reservation. He was a radical. He was an activist but not a murderer. Peltier, a member of the American Indian Movement, had travelled to Pine Ridge to seek to find a way of resolving a dispute between two rival factions in the protest movement.
In all those years, Peltier has remained committed to the cause of social justice. He never ceased protesting his innocence but never bent the knee. He refused to seek a pardon because that would have inferred a degree of guilt. Presidents came and went; Republican and Democrat alike and Peltier remained a political prisoner. Then in a last feeble gesture, Biden released him from prison; but he remains a prisoner.
Peltier’s continued activism and protests at his almost perpetual incarceration saw him capture international headlines with a protracted hunger strike. He fasted for 40 days in solidarity with the Irish hunger strikers led by Bobby Sands in 1981. Peltier ran for President of the USA from prison, in the spirit of socialist candidate Eugene Debbs. Peltier’s candidacy was for the Peace and Freedom Party in the 2004 presidential election. He ran again, as a vice-presidential candidate in 2020 for the Party for Socialism and Liberation.
The monstrous injustice of the decades long high security imprisonment caught the attention of progressives the world over. The bourgeois media was less than willing to give much space to his condition or his case. This would have drawn attention to the cruelty and barbarity of the US ‘justice’ system and its sheer bloody-mindedness. Appeals from Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Mother Theresa and the European Parliament all fell on deaf ears. The allegedly progressive Bill Clinton and Barak Obama were equally blind to reason as were Reagan or Bush. Peltier exposed the unanimity of political thought that exists in a bourgeois world.
As the years turned into decades, Leonard Peltier became more and more ill. He has lost vision in one eye. He has diabetes. He has had open heart surgery, has suffered an aortic aneurism, and still suffers from the effects of long COVID. Mid-way through Biden’s term in office another appeal was made for Peltier’s release.
Nick Tilsen, from the NDN Collective, an indigenous rights organisation in the US was blunt in making that appeal. “The Biden Administration has said that Native American rights are a priority to them, and yet they’ve got the longest sitting Indigenous political prisoner locked up and we’ve seen no action from the federal government.” He continued, saying that “if he dies in prison this will forever be a part of that administration’s legacy as it relates to Native people.”
Tilsen and the NDN Collective had little optimism when challenging Biden. To simply remove Peltier from a closed prison to home detention is not freedom. It does not clear his name of murders he did not commit. Peltier’s lawyer, Kevin Sharp in petitioning for a parole hearing last year argued that “you’ve got a conviction that was riddled with misconduct by the prosecutors, the US Attorney’s office, by the FBI who investigated this case and, frankly the jury … If they tried this today, he would not get convicted.”
Amnesty International joined a long list of those campaigning for his release, as did dozens of members of the US Congress. The lawyer who originally prosecuted the case later agreed that he should be freed.
None of this cuts any ice with those vindictive elements in the US who would be clearly embarrassed if justice were actually served.
Former FBI Director Christopher Wray, whose term of office expired at the same time as Biden, begged the president not to commute the sentence, far less accept that an injustice had been committed. He wrote to Biden, saying that “I urge you in the strongest terms possible: Do not pardon Leonard Peltier or cut his sentence short … It would … undermine the principles of justice and accountability that our government should represent.” The former head of the FBI saw no irony in speaking about justice. Nor did Natalie Bara, president of the FBI Agents Association who wrote that “this last-second, disgraceful act by then-President Biden, which does not change Peltier’s guilt but does release him from prison, is cowardly and lacks accountability.”
Peltier remains a prisoner. His incarceration might not be as vicious as it has been for the past 47 years but as he approaches his 80th birthday, he remains unfree.
Patriotic Americans rally to the flag. They place hands on hearts and sing paeans of praise to America as a bastion of justice, of being the land of the free and the home of the brave. It might once have been so. The country was founded on a noble idea. The infamy of Leonard Peltier’s life-long imprisonment makes a mockery of all that America once prided itself upon.
