Peltier frame-up highlighted

Peltier frame-up highlighted

By Norm Dixon

Amnesty International is highlighting the case of Native American political prisoner Leonard Peltier in this Year of the Indigenous Peoples, AI's US chairperson, Rick Halperin, told Green Left Weekly.

Peltier, a leader of the American Indian Movement, was sentenced in 1977 to two terms of life imprisonment for the murder of two FBI agents.

In 1973 demonstrators peacefully occupied the town of Wounded Knee, on South Dakota's Pine Ridge reservation. During a midnight raid on the activists, 150 FBI and police agents fired shots, and the people fought back. Two FBI agents and one AIM member were killed. Peltier was charged with murder. He has protested his innocence ever since.

"We have many activists working on Peltier's behalf", Halperin said. "There are groups all around the world working on his behalf. Many American AI activists have long been campaigning for a new trial for him."

Evidence has mounted that points to Peltier's innocence, Halperin said. "Even a judge who heard Peltier's initial trial has asked the FBI to reconsider its total commitment to his imprisonment because of the new evidence which has come to light."

Yet the FBI and the government are adamant they won't allow a retrial. "What would it say about them if indeed new evidence shows that he is innocent? It would confirm what almost everybody believes: that the FBI is as corrupt in its prosecutions against certain minorities as any other police force.

"Leonard Peltier is not a singular mistake. There are thousands of such 'mistakes' throughout America's prisons, and throughout America's death rows. The criminal justice system simply won't admit that."

From GLW issue 93