Native American Activist Leonard Peltier Released From Prison

Leonard Peltier, a Native American rights activist held for nearly half a century for the killing of two F.B.I. agents, was released from a federal prison in Central Florida on Tuesday morning.

Mr. Peltier, 80, will serve the remainder of his two life sentences in home confinement in North Dakota, where he is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa.

The commutation of Mr. Peltier’s sentence was one of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s final acts before leaving office. Those urging clemency for Mr. Peltier, who is in poor health and partially blind, included Nobel Peace laureates; former law enforcement officials, including one of the lead prosecutors on the case; human rights organizations; and celebrities like Steven Van Zandt, the guitarist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band.

F.B.I. agents including Christopher Wray, the former director of the agency, strongly opposed clemency for Mr. Peltier, saying that it was a betrayal of the fallen agents, Jack Coler and Ronald Williams. Mr. Wray called Mr. Peltier “a remorseless killer.”

At a news conference on Tuesday afternoon, lawyers for Mr. Peltier, who has maintained his innocence, said that he should not be subjected even to house arrest. “We still have work to do,” his lead lawyer, Jenipher Jones, said. “It is our proposition that any detention of Leonard is unlawful.”

Though Native Americans have not been unanimous in their support for Mr. Peltier, the celebratory news conference held him up as a revered figure who had been unjustly imprisoned. “Leonard did 50 years for us, and tomorrow we are going to welcome him as a hero in our homeland,” said Chase Iron Eyes, a Native American civil rights lawyer.

Mr. Peltier was a member of the American Indian Movement, or AIM, a group that focused attention on the government’s mistreatment of Native Americans. He was convicted for his role in a shootout between activists and F.B.I. agents on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1975 that left two agents and an activist dead. Prosecutors said the agents were shot at point-blank range.

Mr. Peltier has admitted to firing his gun from a distance but has insisted that he acted in self-defense and did not kill the agents.

Of the more than 30 people who were present during the shootout, Mr. Peltier was the only one to be convicted of a crime. Two other AIM members were tried for murder but were acquitted on the grounds that they acted in self-defense. Exculpatory evidence admitted in their trials was excluded from Mr. Peltier’s, which his supporters argue was one way in which his trial was unfair.

An appeals court found in 1986 that the government had withheld evidence, including details of the ballistic analysis from the scene, but said that disclosure of that evidence would “probably” not have changed the jury’s guilty verdict.

In 2021, James Reynolds, a former federal prosecutor whose office handled the prosecution and the appeal, was among those who wrote to Mr. Biden urging clemency for Mr. Peltier. He said that prosecutors had been unable to prove that Mr. Peltier committed any offense and had given little consideration to “the F.B.I.’s role in the creation of dangerous conditions” on the reservation that day.