Biden Commuted Leonard Peltier's Sentence

It is an executive grant of clemency, not an acquittal. He has served fifty years in prison and now he will serve the remainder of the sentence at home.

See the YouTube video description: 

Statement by The Red Nation:

After a half-century of unjust incarceration, Leonard Peltier is finally going home!

“It’s finally over–I’m going home,” said Peltier in response to the news. “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.”

For decades, the now elder Dakota and Ojibwe member of the American Indian Movement represented a powerful symbol for millions. His imprisonment has been viewed as collective punishment against generations of Indigenous people who fought for liberation, from the Red Power Movement of the 1960s and 1970s to the Water Protector Movement that fought against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016. Indigenous peoples have paid in blood to protect their lands, waters, and livelihoods against the onslaught of genocidal settler colonialism. American Indians today face some of the highest rates of imprisonment and police violence of any group. Leonard Peltier’s five decades of unjust imprisonment is an indictment and stain on the so-called “American criminal justice system.”

Like many Native people, Leonard Peltier is also a survivor of the genocidal federal Indian boarding school system, which ripped him away from his family and homeland when he was just a child. Only in the last couple of years has the United States recognized and formally apologized for centuries of atrocities it committed against Indigenous children. Countless horrors inflicted upon Indigenous youth have yet to be fully understood and rectified as their graves continue to be discovered.

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