On February 18, 2025, Leonard Peltier, the Native American activist long considered the United States’ most prominent political prisoner, walked free after nearly 49 years. President Joe Biden had commuted his life sentence weeks earlier, permitting him to serve the remainder under home confinement in North Dakota. His release, coming in the final hours of Biden’s presidency, closes one of the most contentious chapters in American legal history, while opening new questions about justice, memory, and the rights of Indigenous peoples.
For nearly five decades, Peltier sat in a federal prison in Florida, his health steadily deteriorating. At 79, with diabetes, kidney disease, and near-blindness, he embodied the image of America’s longest-serving political prisoner. His story, framed by violence on a Native reservation in the 1970s and preserved by state intransigence ever since, is not only about one man. It is a test of America’s ability to confront its own injustices and its troubled relationship with Indigenous peoples.
The roots of his case lie in a forgotten war on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. In the early 1970s, Pine Ridge became a cauldron of fear. Tribal chairman Richard Wilson, accused of corruption and collaborating with federal authorities, relied on a private militia, the Guardians of the Oglala Nation (GOONs), to silence dissent. Over a three-year span, more than sixty AIM activists and their supporters were killed in what became known as the “Reign of Terror.” Few cases were investigated; fewer still were prosecuted.
The American Indian Movement (AIM), of which Peltier was a prominent member, emerged in this climate. Founded in 1968, AIM channelled the anger of Native communities facing systemic poverty, broken treaties, and police brutality. Its defining moment came in 1973 at Wounded Knee, the site of the 1890 massacre of Lakota men, women, and children. For seventy-one days, AIM activists and local residents occupied the hamlet in defiance of federal neglect. The U.S. government responded with armed force, laying siege to the village. Though the occupation ended, Pine Ridge remained a battlefield of ideology and violence.
It was in this context that tragedy struck on June 26, 1975. Two FBI agents, Jack Coler and Ronald Williams, entered Pine Ridge to pursue suspects in a car theft case. A firefight erupted between the agents and AIM members. By the day’s end, the agents and one young Native man lay dead. Leonard Peltier, present at the compound, fled the scene and later sought asylum in Canada.
The U.S. government pressed for his extradition, producing affidavits from a Native woman who later recanted, saying she had been coerced by the FBI. Despite this, Canada surrendered him to American custody. In 1977, Peltier was convicted of the agents’ murders and sentenced to two consecutive life terms.
The trial remains one of the most controversial in modern American history. The prosecution suppressed ballistic evidence that could have cast doubt on Peltier’s role. Witnesses were intimidated or manipulated. Even the government later conceded it could not prove he fired the fatal shots, only that he was “involved.” Amnesty International has long argued that Peltier’s conviction was tainted by political motives. Nobel laureates including Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and the Dalai Lama called for his release. The United Nations declared his detention arbitrary.
For Native Americans, Peltier was always more than a prisoner. He symbolised how the justice system treated Indigenous resistance, with fear, surveillance, and punishment. His imprisonment resonated with wider histories: of broken treaties, of children taken to boarding schools, of sacred lands seized in the name of development.
For the United States, his case posed a moral dilemma. The Department of Justice insisted due process was served. Yet the moral weight of international appeals, coupled with the humanitarian urgency of his declining health, told a different story. What public safety was served by keeping an elderly man behind bars until the end of his life?
By commuting Peltier’s sentence, Biden signalled that America was at least capable of a measure of self-correction. The decision did not erase the pain of the families of Coler and Williams, nor did it absolve the violent history of AIM’s confrontations. But it distinguished justice from retribution, and it returned an elder to his homeland.
Leonard Peltier has already outlived many of his contemporaries. He has become both a man and a mirror, reflecting the contradictions of a nation that champions human rights abroad while often denying mercy at home. The question is no longer whether he is guilty beyond doubt, too much evidence says otherwise. The question now is whether America is willing, at last, to confront the shadow of its past and extend justice to a people who have known little of it.
Read: The Guardian: Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier released from prison: ‘Finally free’
Watch: Democracy Now: Leonard Peltier on Indigenous Rights, His Half-Century in Prison & More
