(CNN) — In one of his last acts before leaving office, former President Joe Biden commuted the life sentence of Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier, convicted in the 1975 killings of two FBI agents.
Peltier, 80, will serve the remainder of his sentence at home.
“It’s finally over – I’m going home,” Peltier said in a statement shared by NDN Collective, an Indigenous rights group in South Dakota. “I want to show the world I’m a good person with a good heart. I want to help the people, just like my grandmother taught me.”
Peltier was denied parole last year. At his parole hearing, Peltier’s attorneys highlighted his failing health, age and nonviolent record during his nearly 50 years in prison.
He consistently maintained his innocence in the agents’ shooting deaths. Jack Coler and Ronald Williams, were killed in a shootout June 26, 1975, while searching for a robbery suspect on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
The agents went to the reservation to serve arrest warrants, the AP reported, and were injured in the shootout and later shot in the head, the FBI has said.
In 1977, Peltier was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to two consecutive life terms.
“I didn’t kill those agents, I didn’t see who killed those agents, and if I did know, I’m not telling. But I don’t know. That’s the point,” Peltier told former CNN correspondent Mark Potter in 1999.
Peltier said he fired shots during the gunbattle but “I know I didn’t hit them. I know I didn’t.”
CNN has reached out to the FBI Agents Association for comment. Last year, the group applauded the parole board’s decision to deny Peltier’s request for parole.
In the 1970s, Peltier was a leader of the American Indian Movement, which took over the village of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation, the Associated Press reported. The takeover led to a 71-day standoff with federal agents and lasting tensions between the movement and the government.
NDN Collective previously described Peltier as “America’s longest serving Indigenous political prisoner.”
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
