from the series Something I Said…
By DWIGHT HOBBES
Leonard Peltier was railroaded for FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams’ 1975 murder at the historic Pine Ridge Indian Reservation gunfight in South Dakota. Don’t take my word, look it up.
You’ll find some interesting information. Peltier’s attorney, former Tennessee U.S. District Judge Kevin Sharp, told Native News Online in June, “Leonard did not shoot the agents, and the FBI knew this but withheld evidence. The court of appeals acknowledged this but couldn’t overturn the conviction due to legal standards”. During his trial, Darlene Nichols said Peltier told her about committing the crime. She later acknowledged receiving $42,000 from the FBI in connection with her cooperation on the case. No investigation looked into whether the testimony was perjured. FYI. She’s now married to a former FBI Chief Agent. At the trial, FBI agents changed their statements that they’d searched for a red pickup truck and instead said they were looking for an orange and white van, like Peltier’s. That contradiction was highly contentious evidence in the trial that put him away. These are a few facts behind Leonard Peltier’s being set up by the criminal injustice system and locked up this past half-century, sentenced to consecutive life terms, one for each of the agents someone else killed.
This is not only justice denied one man. It marked an opportunity to deal AIM (American Indian Movement) if not a death blow, certainly a telling one. AIM, it bears noting, is no stranger to these parts. In Minneapolis, in1968, Clyde Bellecourt with Dennis Banks, George Mitchell and, later, Eddie Benton-Banai, founded the organization. Like the Black Panthers, AIM took a stand against police harassment (along with other community issues, i.e. discrimination in school, poor housing, and disproportionately high unemployment. Both groups were on J. Edgar Hoover’s hit list of targets to be wiped out whatever it took, including infiltration, which factored in the trumped case against Peltier.
Leonard Peltier doesn’t paint himself as some sort of sainted martyr. He freely admits taking up arms against the FBI in his memoir Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance. The man was a warrior at war. Which did not make him guilty of something he didn’t do.
He recently requested parole on the grounds of: advanced age (79); a nonviolent record in prison; and crucially, failing health due to, among other factors, diabetes and hypertension. He’s partially blind after surviving a stroke. .
Letting Leonard Peltier languish, likely until he dies, is not due process, but entrenched, institutionalized persecution.
Free Leonard Peltier.
Dwight Hobbes is a long-time Twin Cities journalist and essayist.
