From the Editorial Board:
Chicago Tribune, January 13, 2017: Editorial Board
Leonard Peltier is 72 and in his 40th year of a life
sentence for the 1975 murders of two FBI
agents on a reservation in South Dakota. He's a cause célèbre in a movement to
persuade President Barack Obama
to commute that sentence and let Peltier walk free. That movement has a lot of
star power: South African Bishop Desmond Tutu, the Rev. Jesse
Jackson and Robert Redford, among others.
Peltier is among a batch of potential pardons and
clemency requests that Obama could take up in the waning days of his
presidency.
There's Chelsea Manning, the former Army private serving
35 years in prison for disclosing reams of classified material about the U.S.
handling of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are also bids for posthumous
pardons for Ethel Rosenberg, executed in 1953 for conspiring with her husband
to hand over to the Soviet Union secrets about America's nuclear program, and
black heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson, who was imprisoned in 1913 for
transporting his fiancé, a white woman, over state lines for "immoral
purposes."
Manning's disclosures of American wartime military
decisions and tactics rankled the Obama administration, so commutation in her
case is doubtful. Peltier, however, appears to have some momentum.
Besides the celebrities pushing for his release, a
former U.S. attorney at the office that prosecuted Peltier is urging Obama to
consider "compassionate release" for the jailed American Indian
activist. "Forty years is enough," the former prosecutor, James Reynolds,
told the New York Daily News.
No it isn't. Peltier should stay in jail for the rest of
his life.
Peltier was 30 when FBI agents Ronald Williams and Jack
Coler arrived at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota on June 26, 1975,
to arrest robbery suspect Jimmy Eagle. They were met with a torrent of bullets,
from what prosecutors say were at least seven assailants. As the two agents lay
in the dirt heavily wounded, three of the attackers walked up to them. One,
armed with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, shot both in the head at close range.
Brutal, barbaric execution — nothing less.
Peltier was the only assailant wielding an AR-15 that
day, according to eyewitness testimony.
In 1977, a federal jury convicted Peltier of the agents'
murders. He was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences.
Peltier has consistently maintained his innocence. He
and his backers argue that prosecutors never produced anyone who could identify
him as the man who fired the fatal shots. But an appeals court found that it
didn't matter whether he was the shooter; it was sufficient that he was proven
to be an "aider or abettor" in the murders.
Peltier's lawyers have also claimed that the FBI
fabricated and withheld evidence. Appellate courts have agreed that there were
flaws in how the FBI — and prosecutors — handled the case. But those flaws, the
courts ruled, weren't significant enough to warrant a new trial. The U.S.
Supreme Court declined to hear his appeals, and requests for parole have also
been rejected.
Peltier's supporters have always framed the plea for his
release against the backdrop of long-standing mistreatment of Native Americans
by the U.S. government. Pine Ridge is home to Wounded Knee, the site of a
massacre of 200 Sioux men, women and children by the Army's 7th Cavalry in
1890.
But Peltier's case is not about the plight of Native
Americans. It's about justice for two men who were killed while carrying out
their duties as law enforcement officers. Period.
Obama has been unusually generous when it comes to
clemency, issuing more commutations than the combined total for the last 11
presidents. Those commutations, more than 1,170, focus on inmates serving long
sentences for nonviolent drug offenses.
Peltier's case is wholly different. He was convicted of
cold-blooded murder, and for that, he should stay behind bars.
"In the Spirit of Coler and Williams"
Ed Woods
