Leonard Peltier, the 80-year-old activist and “remorseless killer” who has been in prison for just shy of 50 years in connection with a 1975 ambush shooting that left two FBI agents dead on a South Dakota reservation, is headed home.
His first stop is expected to be a welcome home party at a reservation casino, according to the NDN Collective, an indigenous rights group, where supporters plan to celebrate his release from what they claim was a “wrongful incarceration.”
“Today I am finally free,” Peltier said in a statement thanking supporters released by the collective after he left a federal prison in Sumterville, Florida. “They may have imprisoned me, but they never took my spirit.”
In one of his last moves in office, former President Joe Biden granted Peltier clemency over fiery objections from both former FBI Director Christopher Wray and the FBI Agents Association.
BIDEN FREES RADICAL LEFT-WING KILLER CONVICTED IN FBI AGENTS’ MURDERS DURING LAST HOURS AS PRESIDENT
“I hope these letters are unnecessary, and that you are not considering a pardon or commutation,” Wray wrote to Biden just 10 days before the former president granted clemency. “But on behalf of the FBI family, and out of an abundance of caution, I want to make sure our position is clear: Peltier is a remorseless killer, who brutally murdered two of our own – Special Agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams. Granting Peltier any relief from his conviction or sentence is wholly unjustified and would be an affront to the rule of law.”
Peltier was serving two consecutive life sentences for his role in the slayings of FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams. He received another seven years on top of that for an armed escape attempt. A last-minute presidential pardon from Biden declared he should be freed Tuesday.
Peltier’s most recent bid for parole failed in July. Former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both denied clemency requests for him, but he had supporters among other prominent Democrats, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, as well as former Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland.
Members of law enforcement, and former FBI agents in particular, have been incensed by the clemency.
“[Peltier] executed the two agents when they were wounded on the ground – no mercy or forgiveness,” Ed Mireles, the first FBI agent to receive the bureau’s Medal of Valor after a deadly gun battle with two suspected killers in 1986, told Fox News Digital previously. “No mercy or forgiveness for Peltier.”
Peltier was a member of the activist American Indian Movement, and his supporters have claimed he was denied a fair trial. But he was more than just an activist at the time of the FBI slayings at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota – he was the subject of an active arrest warrant for the attempted murder of a police officer in Wisconsin.
He has since portrayed himself as a political prisoner, a move that his Democratic supporters and other activists have embraced.
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