March 23, 2025
SUMTERVILLE, Fla. (AP) — Native American activist Leonard Peltier was released from a Florida prison on Tuesday, weeks after then-President Joe Biden angered law enforcement officials by commuting his life sentence in the 1975 killings of two FBI agents.
The move just before Biden left office also prompted criticism from those who say Peltier is guilty, including former FBI Director Christopher Wray, who called him “a remorseless killer” in a private letter to Biden obtained by The Associated Press.
“Granting Peltier any relief from his conviction or sentence is wholly unjustified and would be an affront to the rule of law,” Wray wrote.
The commutation was not a pardon for crimes committed, something Peltier’s advocates have hoped for since he has always maintained his innocence.
Peltier left the prison Tuesday morning in an SUV, according to a prison official. He didn't stop to speak with reporters or his supporters outside the gates.
After being released from USP Coleman, a high-security prison, the 80-year-old Peltier planned to return to North Dakota, where he is expected to celebrate with friends and family on Wednesday.
Biden commuted Peltier’s sentence Jan. 20, noting he had spent most of his life in prison and was now in poor health.
Peltier, an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians in North Dakota, was active in the American Indian Movement, which beginning in the 1960s fought for Native American treaty rights and tribal self-determination.
The group grabbed headlines in 1969 when activists occupied the former prison island of Alcatraz in the San Francisco Bay, and again in 1972, when they presented presidential candidates with a list of demands including the restoration of tribal land. After they were ignored, they seized the headquarters of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
From then on, the group was subject to FBI surveillance and harassment under a covert program that sought to disrupt activism and was exposed in 1975.
Peltier's conviction stemmed from a confrontation that year on the Oglala Sioux Indian Reservation in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, in which FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams were killed. According to the FBI, the agents were there to serve arrest warrants for robbery and assault with a dangerous weapon.
Prosecutors maintained at trial that Peltier shot both agents in the head at point-blank range. Peltier acknowledged being present and firing a gun at a distance, but he said he fired in self-defense. A woman who claimed to have seen Peltier shoot the agents later recanted her testimony, saying it had been coerced.
He was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and given two consecutive life sentences.
Two other movement members, co-defendants Robert Robideau and Dino Butler, were acquitted on the grounds of self-defense.
Peltier was denied parole as recently as July and was not eligible to be considered for it again until 2026.
