[Exclusive: retired FBI agent Coleen Rowley calls for clemency for
Indigenous activist who has been in prison for nearly 50 years ]
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FBI’S OPPOSITION TO RELEASING LEONARD PELTIER DRIVEN BY VENDETTA,
SAYS EX-AGENT  
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Nina Lakhani
January 18, 2023
The Guardian
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_ Exclusive: retired FBI agent Coleen Rowley calls for clemency for
Indigenous activist who has been in prison for nearly 50 years _

Leonard Peltier, was convicted of murdering two FBI agents and has
been held in maximum security prisons for 46 of the past 47 years.,
Photograph: Courtesy of Jeffry Scott

 

The FBI’s repeated opposition to the release of Leonard Peltier is
driven by vindictiveness and misplaced loyalties, according to a
former senior agent close to the case who is the first agency insider
to call for clemency for the Indigenous rights activist who has been
held in US maximum security prisons for almost five decades.

Coleen Rowley, a retired FBI special agent whose career included 14
years as legal counsel in the Minneapolis division where she worked
with prosecutors and agents directly involved in the Peltier case, has
written to Joe Biden
[[link removed]] making a case for
Peltier’s release.

“Retribution seems to have emerged as the primary if not sole reason
for continuing what looks from the outside to have become an
emotion-driven ‘FBI Family’ vendetta,” said Rowley in the letter
sent to the US president in December and shared exclusively with the
Guardian.

Rowley added: “The focus of my two cents leading to my joining the
call for clemency is based on Peltier’s inordinately long prison
sentence and an ever more compelling need for simple mercy due to his
advanced age and deteriorating health.

“Enough is enough. Leonard Peltier should now be allowed to go
home.”

Peltier, an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribe and
of Lakota and Dakota descent, was convicted of murdering two FBI
agents during a shootout on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota
in June 1975. Peltier was a leader of the American Indian Movement
(AIM), an Indigenous civil rights movement founded in Minneapolis that
was infiltrated and repressed by the FBI.

Rowley refers to the historical context in which the shooting took
place as “… the long-standing horribly wrongful oppressive
treatment of Indians in the U.S. [which] played a key role in putting
both the agents and Peltier in the wrong place at the wrong time”.

The 1977 murder trial – and subsequent parole hearings –
were rife with irregularities and due process violations including
evidence that the FBI had coerced witnesses, withheld and falsified
evidence.

Peltier, now 78, has been held in maximum security prisons for 46 of
the past 47 years. He has always denied shooting the agents. Last
year, UN experts called for Peltier’s immediate release after
concluding that his prolonged imprisonment amounted to arbitrary
detention.

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian about her intervention,
Rowley, who retired in 2004, said that for years new agents were
“indoctrinated” with the FBI’s version of events.

“The facts are murky, and I’m not going to say either narrative is
correct. I wasn’t there. But I do know that if you really care about
justice, then the real issue now is mercy, truth and reconciliation.
To keep this going for almost 50 years really shows the level of
vindictiveness the organisation has for Leonard Peltier.

“The bottom line is there are all kinds of problems in the
intelligence service which by and large never get corrected for the
same reasons: group conformity, pride and an unwillingness to admit
mistakes so systemic problems are covered up and never fixed,” said
Rowley, a 9/11 whistleblower who testified to the Senate about FBI
failures in the terrorist attacks.

Nick Estes, an assistant professor of American Indian studies at the
University of Minnesota, said Rowley’s support of Peltier’s
clemency was “historic”.

“She is trying to dispel a myth that is deeply embedded into the
culture of the FBI … handed down through indoctrinating young
recruits such as Rowley about Peltier’s unquestionable guilt and the
FBI’s supposed blamelessness during the reign of terror on the Pine
Ridge Indian reservation,” said Estes, a volunteer with the
International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee.

Rowley wrote to Biden in response to a letter by the intelligence
agency’s current director vehemently opposing Peltier’s release on
behalf of the “entire FBI family” – which was
recently published online 
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the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI.

Christopher Wray described Peltier as a “remorseless killer who
brutally murdered two of our own – special agents Jack R Coler and
Ronald A Williams”. Commutation of Peltier’s sentence would be
“shattering to the victims’ loved ones and an affront to the rule
of law”, according to Wray’s letter to the justice department’s
pardon attorney dated March 2022.

FBI has successfully opposed every clemency application 
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emotive op-eds, letters and marches on Washington.

But the time served on most murder sentences ranges between 11 and 18
years, while Mark Putnam, the first FBI agent convicted of homicide
– for strangling his female informant – was released after serving
just 10 years of a 16-year sentence. Peltier was sentenced to two
consecutive life sentences, and a parole officer who recommended his
release after acknowledging that there was not enough evidence to
sustain the conviction, was demoted.

“The disparate nature of Peltier being held for nearly a half
century behind bars is striking,” said Rowley, who in the 1990s
helped pen an op-ed by the head of the Minneapolis division opposing
Peltier’s release. “The facts are everything, not loyalty to the
FBI family, not them versus us, not good guys versus bad guys.”

Peltier supporters hope that Rowley’s intervention will count.

“Rowley speaks with authority and is saying that nothing justifies
him being in prison, just vindictiveness, so ignoring her means
turning a blind eye to what’s happening,” said Kevin Sharp,
Peltier’s attorney who submitted the most recent clemency
application 18 months ago. “Rowley knows the case. She knows the FBI
and supervised some of those directly involved. She knows Indian
Country, so understands the context, which is really important.”

Peltier is currently being held in a maximum security prison in
Coleman, Florida, where his health has significantly deteriorated
since contracting Covid-19, according to Sharp, who visited in
December. Multiple recommendations by the facility to lower
Peltier’s classification, so that he can be transferred to a less
restrictive prison closer to his family, have been rejected.

“This is a little old man with a walker. It’s not just the FBI
that’s vindictive,” added Sharp, a former federal judge appointed
by Obama who stepped down from the bench in protest of mandatory
minimum sentences. He took on Peltier’s case in 2018 after
successfully obtaining a pardon from Donald Trump for a young Black
man he had been forced to imprison.

According to Sharp, Peltier’s clemency was still on the table until
Trump’s last day in office but didn’t make it on to the final list
of presidential pardons which was mostly former associates and
white-collar criminals.

He added: “This is not about a 10-minute shootout. It’s about
hundreds of years of what had gone before and the decades of what’s
gone on afterwards. That’s why Leonard Peltier was convicted, and
that’s why he’s still in jail.”

_Nina Lakhani is senior reporter for Guardian US.
Twitter @ninalakhani [[link removed]]_

* Leonard Peltier
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* political prisoner
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* FBI
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* justice denied
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* executive clemency
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