[Ppnews] Tragedy of Leonard Peltier vs. the US

[Political Prisoner News]

The Tragedy of Leonard Peltier vs. the US

http://www.freepeltiernow.org/matthiessen20091119.htm
http://freepeltiernow.blogspot.com/2009/11/tragedy-of-leonard-peltier-vs-us.html

By <http://www.nybooks.com/authors/18>Peter Matthiessen

On July 27, 2009, I drove west from New York to 
the old riverside town of Lewisburg in central 
Pennsylvania, the site of the federal 
penitentiary where early the next morning I would 
make an appeal to the parole board on behalf of 
the American Indian Movement (AIM) activist 
Leonard Peltier in his first parole hearing in 
fifteen years. On this soft summer evening, a 
quiet gathering of Peltier supporters from all 
over the country had convened in a small park 
near the Susquehanna River. Despite his long 
history of defeats in court, these Indians and 
whites sharing a makeshift picnic at wood tables 
under the trees were optimistic about a favorable 
outcome. Surely a new era of justice for 
minorities and poor people had begun with the 
Obama administration, and anyway, wasn't 
Leonard's freedom all but assured by the Parole 
Act of 2005, which mandated release for inmates 
who had spent thirty or more years in prison?

Leonard Peltier, an Ojibwa-Lakota from Turtle 
Mountain, North Dakota, was one of the three 
young Indians who were among the participants in 
a shoot-out with the FBI at Oglala on South 
Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation on a hot dusty 
day in June 1975. They were later charged with 
the deaths of FBI agents Jack Coler and Ron 
Williams. Ostensibly searching for a suspect in a 
recent robbery case, the agents had been warned 
by tribal police not to enter the property where 
the AIM Indians had their camp. Their intrusion 
apparently provoked a warning that led to an 
exchange of gunfire. Understandably outraged by 
the deaths of Coler and Williams and in 
particular by the fact that an unknown "shooter" 
had finished off both wounded men at point-blank 
range, their fellow agents would also suffer 
intense frustration and embarrassment when a 
dozen or more of the Indians involved, using a 
brushy culvert under a side road, escaped a tight 
cordon of hundreds of agents, Indian and state 
police, national guardsmen, and vigilantes who had the area surrounded.

More galling still, Bob Robideau and Dino Butler, 
two of the three AIM suspects in the killings 
arrested during the FBI's huge "ResMurs" 
(Reservation Murders) investigation, were 
acquitted a year later in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on 
a plea of self-defense, as the third and last 
suspect, Leonard Peltier, would certainly have 
been as well, had he not fled to Canada. He was 
arrested there in February 1976, extradited back 
to the US, and tried separately. Though 
originally indicted with the others on identical 
evidence, he was barred by a hostile new judge, 
Paul Benson, from presenting the same argument 
based on self-defense that had led to Robideau 
and Butler's acquittal. Furiously prosecuted as 
the lone killer and convicted for both deaths on 
disputed evidence, Peltier was sentenced in 
February 1977 in Fargo, North Dakota, to two 
consecutive life terms in federal prison.

The following year, when Peltier's conviction was 
appealed, 8th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge 
Donald Ross denounced the coercion of witnesses 
and manipulation of evidence in his case as "a 
clear abuse of the investigative process by the 
FBI"; the US Attorney's Office, too, would be 
sharply criticized for withholding exculpatory 
evidence. In October 1984, in an evidentiary 
hearing in Bismarck, North Dakota, ordered by the 
appellate court to review the possibility of a 
new trial, the prosecutor, US Attorney Lynn 
Crooks, had to concede that the FBI's own 
laboratory had failed to verify the claimed 
ballistics link between Peltier and the murder 
weapon that was used to nail down his 
conviction—a shell casing of disputed provenance 
that Crooks had called "perhaps the most 
important piece of evidence in this case." Even 
so, Judge Benson refused to reconsider the conviction.

The following year when the decision was appealed 
again, Crooks finally admitted that the identity 
of "the shooter" had never been proven and was in 
fact unknown to the prosecution even when it was 
twisting the evidence to ensure Peltier's 
conviction and make certain that its third and 
last suspect—by its own description, "the only 
one we got"—was imprisoned for life. Yet the 
appellate court, while noting that so much 
tainted evidence had deprived the defendant of 
his constitutional right to due process of law, 
found "no compelling legal justification" for ordering a new trial.

In a TV interview after his retirement in 1989, 
Judge Gerald Heaney, who had signed that 
astonishing decision, called it "the most 
difficult I had to make in twenty-two years on 
the bench." The following year, in the National 
Law Journal, this troubled jurist held the FBI 
"equally responsible" for the deaths of its two 
agents; in a letter to Senator Daniel Inouye of 
Hawaii, he urged commutation of Peltier's 
sentence. Questioned on the same 1989 TV show 
about the perjured affidavits extracted by FBI 
agents from a frightened alcoholic, US Attorney 
Crooks declared: "I don't really know and I don't 
really care if they were false. I don't agree 
that we did anything wrong, but I can tell you, 
it don't bother my conscience one whit if we 
did." Properly outraged by this arrogant refusal 
to repudiate US government use of fabricated 
evidence, Senator Inouye, as a former US 
attorney, called Crooks "a disgrace to the profession."

I first interviewed Leonard Peltier in Marion 
Penitentiary in 1981, and that same year, with 
his original codefendant Bob Robideau, I 
inspected the Jumping Bull Ranch at Oglala where 
the shoot-out had taken place. Later, after 
reading many if not most of the pertinent 
documents, including the FBI field reports and 
the transcripts of both trials, I returned to 
Oglala to interview local people and study the 
scene again. Like the FBI, I would hear all sorts 
of rumors about the many young Indians involved 
without learning which one had fired the fatal 
shots; however there seemed to me no doubt 
whatever that Leonard Peltier had been railroaded into prison.

Unfortunately my long book making that 
case<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23388#fn*>[*] 
was quickly suppressed by libel suits brought by 
South Dakota's attorney general, William Janklow, 
and an FBI agent named David Price. Eight years 
would pass before both suits were summarily 
dismissed and the book was back in circulation. 
Meanwhile Peltier's long fight for a fair trial 
had won his endorsement as a political prisoner 
by Amnesty International, and his thousands of 
supporters throughout the world included the 
Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and the 
great majority of his own people in the more than 
250 Indian nations that had formally demanded his release.

In Peltier's first parole hearing in 1996, the 
examiner filed an internal recommendation in 
Peltier's favor. (The US Parole Commission, like 
the US Attorney's Office and the FBI, is under 
the aegis of the Justice Department: its examiner 
informs himself about the case, questions both 
sides, and appraises the new evidence, if any.) 
Yet in actions so belated and irregular as to 
raise suspicion of undue influence, the 
commission replaced that first examiner with one 
more to its liking and denied parole.

By then, the few bold lawmakers who had called 
for investigations had retreated or retired, and 
Peltier's best hope was executive clemency. To 
that end, I wangled my way into the Oval Office 
and pressed my book about the case into President 
Clinton's hands. In January 2001, during 
Clinton's last week in office, as FBI 
lobbyists—the Association of Retired FBI Agents 
and No Parole for Peltier—marched in front of the 
White House, I joined attorney Bruce Ellison and 
filmmaker Jon Kilik in a long meeting with the 
presidential and White House counsels in which we 
argued that granting clemency to an American 
Indian who could offer nothing in return was a 
bold symbolic step that could only enhance the 
President's last-minute efforts to prop up his legacy.

The lawyers seemed impressed and hopes were high, 
but when the clemency list appeared on the 
Saturday morning of Inauguration Day, Peltier's 
name was missing. The phone call I dreaded was 
put through from Leavenworth Prison in early 
afternoon. "They didn't give it to me," mumbled a 
stunned voice I scarcely recognized—the first 
time in twenty years of visits, letters, and 
telephone conversations that Leonard Peltier's 
strong spirit sounded broken. With all court 
appeals exhausted and no hope of mercy from the 
incoming Republican administration, this aging 
prisoner was condemned to wait for his next parole hearing in 2009.

In the park in Lewisburg, people agreed that had 
the shoot-out victims not been "FBIs," Leonard 
might never have been convicted; at the very 
least, he would have been paroled many years 
before. Someone in the park recalled the fear and 
disruption on the reservations caused by the 
FBI's huge ResMurs investigation (which was 
widely perceived as the latest chapter in the 
long history of oppression and revenge against 
"the redskins who killed Custer" that had led up 
to the shoot-out). The killing that day in June 
1975 of a young member of the AIM by a marksman's 
bullet in the forehead had gone all but 
unmentioned, someone said, let alone investigated 
by "the Injustice Department," doubtless because 
"Injuns don't count." How about Bob Robideau's 
statement to an FBI man that he had been "the 
shooter"? Would the Parole Commission take that 
into account? And was it suspicious that Robideau 
had been found dead last February in Barcelona? 
(The official autopsy concluded that he had 
struck his head in a fall while suffering a seizure.)

With Peltier's attorney Eric Seitz and the two 
other parole advocates —Dr. Thom White Wolf 
Fassett, a Seneca elder and United Methodist 
adviser to Congress on Indian affairs, and an 
Ojibwa woman named Cindy Maleterre representing 
Peltier's Turtle Mountain Reservation—I went 
early the next morning to the prison, passing 
supporters waving "Free Peltier" signs at the entrance road.

In the hearing room the first to speak were the 
two sons of the late agent Jack Coler. After 
testifying to their family's great loss, they 
suggested that if this man facing them today were 
to take responsibility and express remorse for 
those brutal murders he so stubbornly denies 
having committed, the Coler family might not 
protest his parole. But the three FBI spokesmen 
and the assistant US attorney who spoke next were 
content to repeat the same vilifications and 
distortions of the facts that won a conviction 
back in 1977. Locked long ago into their ResMurs 
myth, they insisted that Peltier was still a 
danger to the public and cited those provisions 
in the Parole Act specifying that parole may be 
denied if the subject's release might "depreciate 
the seriousness of the offense" or "promote disrespect for the law."

In response to the charge that Peltier has evaded 
his responsibility for those murders, Eric Seitz 
countered that the FBI and the US Attorney's 
Office have evaded responsibility for their own 
illegal tactics in his prosecution. Otherwise 
Seitz made no attempt to retry a long historic 
case in a few minutes, emphasizing instead the 
prisoner's exemplary behavior record, serious 
health problems, and other strong qualifications 
for parole under the commission's geriatric and 
medical criteria. He reminded Examiner Scott 
Kubic that in a few weeks, on September 12, when 
Peltier would turn sixty-five, he would also 
become eligible for home detention under the new 
Second Chance program for elderly inmates 
designed to ease overcrowding in the US prisons.

Thom White Wolf testified that Peltier's 
incarceration for nearly thirty-three years has 
been viewed both nationally and internationally 
as a gross injustice and a major embarrassment to 
our country, with a negative effect on the 
world's view of how the US government treats its 
native population. When my turn came, I spoke to 
the points made in this article, adding how much 
this inmate had matured over the three decades of 
our acquaintance, not only as an articulate 
spokesman for his people but as an artist, 
self-taught in the prisons, whose work is admired 
throughout the US. And Cindy Maleterre assured 
the examiner that the prisoner's Ojibwa-Dakota 
people at Turtle Mountain—including grandchildren 
he has never seen—had already taken care of the 
parole requirements of social support, adequate 
housing, and steady employment (as an 
arts-and-crafts teacher and alcoholism counselor 
on the reservation), and were planning to welcome him home with a great feast.

That afternoon we left the prison with the 
feeling that Examiner Kubic had listened 
carefully and would recommend parole—a guarded 
optimism we conveyed to the flag-waving 
supporters awaiting our report on the public 
road. But no one forgot how the examiner's 
finding in Peltier's favor fifteen years before 
had been aborted; in the next weeks, as so often 
in the past, the prisoner would have to suffer the suspense of desperate hope.

On Friday, August 20, federal inmate #89637-132 
received terse notice that his petition for 
parole had been denied: not until his "15-year 
Reconsideration Hearing in July 2024," he was 
informed, would he become eligible to be turned 
down again. In the unlikely event that he lives 
long enough to attend that hearing, Inmate Peltier will be eighty years old.

In his angry response, Attorney Seitz accused the 
commission of "adopting the position of the FBI 
that anyone who may be implicated in the killings 
of its agents should never be paroled and should 
be left to die in prison." I entirely agree with 
Seitz and share his anger. For the prisoner and 
his supporters, the Lewisburg hearing had been 
hollow, with a predetermined outcome: The United 
States v. Leonard Peltier had always been a 
matter less of justice than of retribution.

Americans—those in public office 
especially—should inform themselves about this 
painful case and demand an unbiased investigation 
that might start with one simple question: If, in 
the thirty-three years since his trial, reputable 
evidence has ever emerged that Leonard Peltier 
was the lone killer and deserves to be in prison 
for life, why hasn't the Justice Department produced it?

Without public protest, Peltier will not be 
granted a fair hearing since his prosecutors know 
that in the absence of honest evidence, "the only 
one we got" would be set free. Instead, this 
man's life leaks away behind grim concrete walls 
for the unworthy purpose of saving face for the 
FBI and a US Attorney's Office that together 
botched the famous ResMurs case and mean to see 
somebody pay. And who better for this fate than a 
"radical" AIM Indian who dared stand up to 
"legally constituted authority" in defense of his 
humiliated people, as he was doing with such 
tragic consequences on that long-ago June day?

In reviewing this case with an open mind, as 
surely he must in fulfilling his oath of office, 
Attorney General Eric Holder (the assistant 
attorney general in 2001) might reflect on his 
own role in the clemency bestowed by Clinton on 
Marc Rich, the notorious "fugitive felon." He 
might consider, too, Rich's consequent evasion of 
even a single day in prison in the harsh light of 
the eleven thousand days already served by a 
penniless American Indian who remains innocent 
before the law, having never been proven guilty.


Notes

<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23388#fnr*>[*]In 
the Spirit of Crazy Horse (Viking, 1983).



Freedom Archives
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415 863-9977

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