By Graham Lee Brewer and Curt Anderson
Associated Press
SUMTERVILLE, Fla. — 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 to home confinement in the 1975 killings of two FBI agents.
Peltier, 80, left Coleman penitentiary in an SUV, according to a prison official. He didn’t stop to speak with reporters or the roughly two dozen supporters who gathered outside the gates to celebrate his release.
Peltier, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians in North Dakota, was headed back to his reservation where the tribe arranged a house for him to live in while serving his home confinement.
Throughout his nearly half-century in prison, Peltier has maintained that he didn’t murder FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams during a confrontation that day on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Native Americans widely believe he was a political prisoner who was wrongly convicted because he fought for tribal rights as a member of the American Indian Movement.
Biden did not pardon Peltier. But his Jan. 20 commutation of Peltier’s sentence to home confinement, noting Peltier had spent most of his life behind bars and was in poor health, prompted criticism from those who believe Peltier is guilty. Among them is former FBI Director Christopher Wray, who called Peltier “a remorseless killer” in a private letter to Biden obtained by The Associated Press.
Peltier was active in AIM, which formed in the 1960s and fought for Native American treaty rights and tribal self-determination.
Peltier’s conviction stemmed from a 1975 confrontation on the in Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota in which the two FBI agents were killed. According to the FBI, Coler and Williams 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 and that his shots weren’t the ones that killed the agents. 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 AIM members, 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.