By Jeremy Roebuck · The Washington Post (c) 2025
In one of his final acts as president, Joe Biden on Monday commuted the life sentence of Native American activist Leonard Peltier, whose case had become a rallying cry for the Indigenous movement in the nearly 50 years since his conviction for killing two FBI agents.
Peltier, 80, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, had been serving two life sentences at a federal penitentiary in Florida for the 1975 slayings of agents Ronald Williams and Jack Coler during a shootout at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.
His case has been criticized for decades by supporters who say he did not receive a fair trial. Peltier was denied parole as recently as this summer and wouldn’t have been eligible again until next year. His health has declined significantly in recent years, advocates said, after multiple bouts with covid-19, diabetes, a stroke and an aortic aneurysm.
Biden, in a statement, cited those health concerns to explain his decision, saying the commutation would allow Peltier to serve the remainder of his sentence at home without being pardoned for his crimes.
The commutation was one of a raft of pardons and clemency actions Biden signed in his final hours in the White House on Monday – including preemptive pardons for members of Biden’s family, retired Gen. Mark A. Milley, Anthony S. Fauci and members and staff of the Jan. 6 congressional committee.
“It’s finally over – I’m going home,” Peltier said, according to the NDN Collective, an indigenous rights organization in Rapid City, South Dakota, that had advocated for his release. “I want to show the world I’m a good person with a good heart. I want to help the people, just like my grandmother taught me.”
Peltier’s case has long been a flash point for the Indigenous rights movement, which says the FBI coerced witnesses in his case and that prosecutors withheld exculpatory evidence, leading to an unjust conviction. Activists have worked for decades to secure his release.
But the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have consistently opposed it, and Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama denied previous bids for clemency.
This month, then-FBI Director Christopher A. Wray wrote to Biden to express his “vehement and steadfast opposition” to any clemency grant for Peltier that the president might be considering.
Wray dismissed Peltier’s claims of an unfair trial as meritless and accused his sympathizers of “wrongly promot[ing] him as a standard-bearer for legitimate grievances about the United States government’s historical treatment of Native Americans.”
“Peltier is a ruthless murderer who has shown a complete lack of remorse for his many crimes,” the FBI director wrote. “The overwhelming and unassailable evidence of Peltier’s guilt, coupled with his persistent refusal to accept responsibility, make him wholly unfit for a commutation or pardon.”
And just days before Biden’s commutation announcement, a group called the “No Parole Peltier Association,” led by retired FBI agents, celebrated in a post on the group’s website that Biden had not so far acted on Peltier’s clemency requests.
A member of the American Indian Movement, a national organization founded in the 1960s to address issues of police brutality and discrimination against Native Americans, Peltier has admitted to participating in the shootout that resulted in the deaths of Williams and Coler. But he has insisted he did so in self-defense and did not kill the agents.
The two men were shot in the head at close range while on the Pine Ridge reservation attempting to arrest a fugitive, the FBI has said. Peltier fled to Canada and was eventually extradited to the United States before standing trial on two counts of first-degree murder.
Though more than 30 other activists were present during the shootout, Peltier was the only one convicted of a crime for his role. Two other members of the movement, Robert Robideau and Dino Butler, were tried for murder but acquitted – in part due to exculpatory evidence that was admitted during their trials but excluded from Peltier’s.
Supporters of Peltier’s past bids for release have pointed to other aspects of the case to suggest he did not receive a fair trial, including recantations from key prosecution witnesses who said their testimony was given to FBI agents under duress.
Over the years, liberal lawmakers, human rights organizations and luminaries including the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, civil rights icon Coretta Scott King and celebrities such as actor Robert Redford and Steven Van Zandt, guitarist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, have joined the lobbying, letter-writing and demonstrations advocating for Peltier’s release. Some members of the original prosecution team and the judge who sentenced Peltier have also written in support of some form of clemency for Peltier over the years.
Fawn Sharp, a former president of the National Congress of American Indians and former tribal president of the Quinault Indian Nation in Washington state, said she “could cry with joy” after learning of Peltier’s commutation Monday. Sharp was one of 120 Indigenous leaders who wrote to Biden last week urging him to take action to spare Peltier before leaving office.
“I am beyond excited [at] what this means symbolically for the entire population of Native Americans,” Sharp said. She described Peltier as a “symbol of our enduring spirit of not being broken against an incredibly powerful force, the United States.”
In a post Monday on X, Deb Haaland, Biden’s interior secretary and the first Native American Cabinet secretary, said Peltier’s commutation “signifies a measure of justice that has long evaded so many Native Americans for so many decades.”
“I am grateful that Leonard can go now go home to his family,” she wrote. “I applaud President Joe Biden for this action and understanding what this means to Indian Country.”
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Dana Hedgpeth contributed to this report.