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Seven senators on Tuesday urgently appealed to President Joe Biden to grant clemency to Leonard Peltier, the ailing 78-year-old Native American rights activist whom the U.S. authorities put in jail 46 years in the past after a trial riddled with misconduct and racism.
“Mr. Peltier’s continued imprisonment defies the guarantees of justice, and the ability to train mercy on this case lies solely inside your discretion,” reads a letter to Biden from Democratic Sens. Brian Schatz (Hawaii), Patrick Leahy (Vt.), Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), Ed Markey (Mass.), Bernie Sanders (Vt.), Mazie Hirono (Hawaii) and Tina Smith (Minn.).
“Mr. Peltier has spent greater than half of his life behind bars,” the senators stated. “We commend the steps that your administration has taken to proper previous wrongs of our authorities’s therapy of Native People, notably via [Interior] Secretary [Deb] Haaland’s management and her Federal Indian Boarding Faculty Initiative. Moreover, your administration has demonstrated a laudable dedication to upholding the core American values of liberty and justice, and rectifying inequities within the prison justice system.”
“Per these actions, we urge you to grant clemency to Mr. Peltier by commuting the rest of his sentence,” they conclude.
A duplicate of the letter was additionally despatched to Legal professional Basic Merrick Garland and Elizabeth Oyer, the pardon legal professional on the Justice Division.
Right here’s a duplicate of the senators’ letter, first obtained by HuffPost.
Peltier is taken into account by many to be America’s longest-serving political prisoner. He’s been in jail since 1975, when the FBI and U.S. Legal professional’s Workplace convicted him of murdering two FBI brokers throughout a shootout on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
However they by no means had proof that he dedicated a criminal offense, and the extent of misconduct that happened in his trial is baffling: Prosecutors hid exculpatory proof. The FBI threatened and coerced witnesses into mendacity. All of his co-defendants had been acquitted on grounds of self-defense. A juror admitted she was biased towards Peltier’s race on the second day of the trial however was allowed to stay on the panel.
Past that, his decades-long parole course of has been so problematic that United Nations authorized consultants reviewed his case and over the summer time referred to as on Biden to launch him instantly. The working group concluded in a damning 17-page authorized opinion: “Mr. Peltier continues to be detained as a result of he’s Native American.”
The extra time that’s passed by, the extra folks have demanded Peltier’s launch. Advocates for his freedom have included Native American elected officers, celebrities like Steven Van Zandt, worldwide human rights leaders like Pope Francis and Nelson Mandela, Amnesty Worldwide, and even some of the identical individuals who helped put him in jail within the first place.
In a unprecedented letter to Biden final yr, James Reynolds, the U.S. legal professional who oversaw Peltier’s prosecution on attraction, wrote, “I write in the present day from a place uncommon for a former prosecutor: to beseech you to commute the sentence of a person who I helped put behind bars.” And the late Choose Gerald Heaney, who presided over Peltier’s 1986 attraction, later referred to as for commuting his sentence, saying his trial was unjust and “a therapeutic course of should start.”
Tuesday’s letter marks the primary time that some senators have publicly pressured Biden to launch Peltier. Over the past yr, Hirono, Leahy, Sanders and Schatz have individually urged the president to grant clemency to him. However Warren, Markey and Smith simply added their names to the trigger.
A White Home spokesperson didn’t instantly reply to a request for touch upon the attraction from Democratic senators or, extra broadly, on whether or not Biden is contemplating clemency for Peltier.
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