President Biden commuted the prison sentence of Leonard Peltier, an imprisoned Native American rights activist, using his final minutes of presidential power on Monday to free a man who has spent nearly 50 years in federal prison after he was convicted of murder in connection with the killing of two F.B.I. agents.
Supporters of Mr. Peltier, who include tribal leaders, lawmakers and global figures, have long pushed for his release, arguing that he was unjustly convicted after an unfair trial. But former and current F.B.I. officials, including Christopher Wray, the agency director, resisted the commutation as a betrayal of the dead officers.
Mr. Peltier, 80, is in poor health and partially blind, after suffering bouts of Covid-19, an aortic aneurysm, diabetes and a stroke. The commutation, Mr. Biden said in the grant issued shortly before President-elect Donald J. Trump took his oath of office, will allow Mr. Peltier to serve the remainder of his sentence in home confinement.
“If there were ever a case that merited compassionate release, Leonard Peltier’s was it,” said Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, the top Democrat on the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, who has long championed a pardon for Mr. Peltier. “President Biden did the right thing by showing this aging man in poor health mercy and allowing him to return home to spend whatever days he has remaining with his loved ones.”
Mr. Peltier, a citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, received two life sentences in connection with a shootout between federal agents and tribal rights activists in 1975, which left two F.B.I. agents and one activist dead. Mr. Peltier, part of a movement dedicated to upholding Native American treaty rights with the American government, has admitted to participating in the shootout in self-defense, but says he did not kill either agent.
“This last-second, disgraceful act by then-President Biden, which does not change Peltier’s guilt but does release him from prison, is cowardly and lacks accountability,” said Natalie Bara, president of the F.B.I. Agents Association, a private nonprofit that serves the bureau’s current and former special agents. “It is a cruel betrayal to the families and colleagues of these fallen agents and is a slap in the face of law enforcement.
Mr. Wray had also argued against granting any form of clemency in the case. And on Monday, Attorney General Marty Jackley of South Dakota said his office “strongly opposes this action and has in recent months argued against any change in the defendant’s sentence.”
In the waning days of the Biden administration, as the president granted thousands of pardons, tribal leaders and Democratic lawmakers intensified their yearslong push for Mr. Biden to include Mr. Peltier.
His supporters said that his trial was unjust, pointing to exculpatory evidence used in other trials related to the shootout that was excluded from Mr. Peltier’s. The U.S. attorney whose office oversaw Mr. Peltier’s prosecution has also joined an array of global and federal leaders, including the Dalai Lama, in calling for his release.
Mr. Peltier had parole denied repeatedly, including in July. But he remained “a leader of our people, and an elder of our people,” said Nick Tilsen, the founder and chief executive of NDN Collective, an Indigenous rights organization. “It wasn’t just about his freedom. It was about freedom for Indian people.”
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