Prisoner of Conscience - Alex Reinsch-Goldstein

Prisoner of Conscience The life and persecution of Leonard Peltier By Alex Reinsch-Goldstein

Flawed trials, jailed activists, and efforts to suppress political opponents are the sort of thing that we associate with backwards dictatorships in distant lands. But that sort of injustice does happen far closer to home. An innocent man remains behind bars following a prosecution that bears all the hallmarks of the fraudulence and brutality that we condemn in others. This is the story of Leonard Peltier.

On the morning of June 26th, 1975. FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams sped down a narrow road on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, looking for a young man named Jimmy Eagle, who was wanted for stealing a pair of cowboy boots. At about 11:50 in the morning, they spotted a red pickup truck matching the description of Eagle’s--following it, they turned off the road and onto a dirt track which led up to a small settlement called Jumping Bull. On the rise ahead of them were a few ranch houses and, concealed in a gulch, a camp of American Indian Movement (AIM) members who had come there to escape the violence of the reservation. Somewhere on the track below Jumping Bull, someone fired the first shot--we probably will never know who. Bullets began flying back and forth between the agents and the occupants in the truck, who were later joined by those at the Jumping Bull camp who heard the firing. The agents radioed that they had followed a red pickup to Jumping Bull, they had been fired on, they were wounded,

and they would be killed if help didn’t arrive soon. Help didn’t come, and within ten minutes Coler and Williams were dead. The FBI and Bureau of Indian Affairs police surrounded Jumping Bull in the afternoon. After one AIM member was killed and others were arrested, the manhunt immediately began for those who had escaped. Among them was an AIM activist named Leonard Peltier. AIM members who were suspected of taking part in the shootings were tracked down and arrested. Several months later, AIM member Bob Robideau was driving Peltier’s station wagon on a Kansas highway when ammunition in the car exploded and caused a fire. When law enforcement arrived at the scene, they found Agent Williams’ rifle, as well as a rifle belonging to Peltier. Another AIM member who had been present at the shooting, Darrelle Butler, was found and arrested--and Agent Coler’s gun was later discovered in his car. Peltier had meanwhile fled to Canada. He was declared a prime suspect--though the FBI felt that Butler and Robideau’s possession of the agents’ weapons was enough to build a case against them separately if they could not immediately get Peltier. A federal jury acquitted Butler and Robideau--them taking the agents’ guns was not enough to convince the jury that they had fired the fatal shots. After the acquittal of Robideau and Butler, the US government sought to get its hands

on Peltier. An extradition warrant was issued, and on February 6, 1976, seven months after Coler and Williams were killed, Peltier was arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and sent back to the United States to face trial. In April of 1977, Peltier was convicted for the murder of agents Coler and Williams. He was given two consecutive life sentences, condemning him to die in prison. Who was Leonard Peltier, and what led to that fatal day on Pine Ridge? Peltier’s life began as was common for native people in the middle of the 20th century: hardship, poverty, alienation, forced assimilation. Reservations were being broken up and recognition of tribal sovereignty ended under the Termination Act. Thousands of Native Americans moved to the cities; it was there that they founded organizations like AIM. Born the 11th of 13 children in 1944, Peltier was sent to an Indian boarding school where native language and customs were forbidden, and they were forced to dress, act, and speak like white men. He dropped out in ninth grade and moved around the West. It was in Seattle that he first discovered activism, founding a halfway house for native former prisoners and working with Seattle’s native people to legally regain confiscated land. In the early ‘70s, he joined AIM. Originally founded in Minneapolis in the late 1960s, AIM was at its zenith in those days--staging protests

from sea to sea, holding marches, and occupying Alcatraz Island for nineteen months. In 1971, Peltier joined thousands of AIM members in marching on Washington DC, where they occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs building and turned its American flag upside down as a symbol of distress. AIM activism soon reached Pine Ridge--one of the most underprivileged areas in the nation. Even forty years later, conditions are not much better. Pine Ridge has the lowest life expectancy of anywhere in the Western Hemisphere beside Haiti--fewer than half live to be fifty. Infant mortality is the highest of anywhere in the United States. On Pine Ridge, then as now, life was often hard and short. AIM activists and other traditionalists had tried to remove the fed-friendly tribal chairman, Dick Wilson, from office. In retaliation, Wilson founded a private militia, the Guardians of the Oglala Nation (GOONs), which began killing AIM members. AIM members seized control of the Town of Wounded Knee, and a 71-day siege ensued. Leonard Peltier, then living in Milwaukee, was heading west to join the Wounded Knee activists, but the siege had ended before he got there: the AIM activists had agreed to stand down after being starved out and demoralized by the killings. Things got no better after the siege. Killing by the GOONs continued, and the FBI either declined to investigate them or attributed the deaths to natural causes. The reservation become so lawless that the FBI took over much of the day-to-day policing. It was in this atmosphere of rampant violence that Agent Coler and Agent Williams were killed. Peltier was well known to the FBI before the killings, and in the months that followed, he was catapulted onto the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list. Learning that he had escaped to Canada, the US government contrived to get him back. To meet the standards necessary to extradite him, the FBI invoked the testimony of Myrtle Poor Bear, who claimed to have been Peltier’s girlfriend and to have seen him participate in the killings. It later turned out that Poor Bear didn’t even know Peltier and hadn’t been at Jumping Bull during the shootout. Poor Bear admitted that she had lied, but clarified that the FBI had coerced her into doing so in order to get some material evidence against Peltier.

Now extradited, Peltier went to face trial. The prosecution built its case on ballistics evidence and witness testimony--both of which were later revealed to be flawed.

Now extradited, Peltier went to face trial. The prosecution built its case on ballistics evidence and witness testimony--both of which were later revealed to be flawed. The FBI claimed that it had been Peltier who Coler and Williams had followed to Jumping Bull, even though Peltier drove a white and orange station wagon, not a red pickup truck. The FBI later revised the agents’ description to fit Peltier’s car, and made no mention to the jury of what Coler and Williams had actually described. The prosecution further stated that ballistics tests (tests later found unreliable in nature) had matched Peltier’s gun to cartridge. A more reliable test of the gun’s firing pin, which could have determined more conclusively whether the bullets came from Pelter’s gun, was not performed during the investigation. Following a Freedom of Information Act request in 1993, the FBI did perform such a test and found that Peltier’s gun was not a match. The FBI also relied on testimony from witnesses saying that they had seen Peltier, along with Butler and Robideau, near the agent’s cars. These witnesses later said that FBI agents had threatened them, tied them to chairs, and denied them their right to speak to an attorney in order to extract that testimony. Based on the mountain of contrived evidence, the jury found Peltier guilty. He has been behind bars since then--writing, giving interviews, and fighting for his release. The government has turned down his appeals each time, in spite of the fact that the Parole Commission “recognizes that the prosecution has conceded the lack of any direct evidence that [Peltier] personally participated in the executions of the two FBI agents.” Leonard Peltier is now 75 years old, and will die in prison if he is not pardoned or paroled. As the years have passed by, the case against him is ailing too: in all likelihood, the man who killed Coler and Williams is still out there. Justice for the deaths at Jumping Bull has not been forthcoming. And a man remains in prison guilty of only one thing: being an activist for the rights of his people. The U.S. government keeps a prisoner of conscience behind bars.