Leonard Peltier: Time for Truth? Or Remain a Cause Celebre?

Leonard Peltier was dealt another blow last week when he was denied a prison transfer to North Dakota, instead winding up further away from the Badlands, than he was before.

Leonard Peltier is back in the news again after being transferred to a prison even further away from his tribal homeland. Peltier's case has been ongoing since 1977, when he was sentenced to two life sentences for the murders of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. Since then, appeal after appeal has kept the case alive, if not in judicial terms, certainly those of a cause celebre. Amnesty International refers to Peltier as a political prisoner, as do all the other human rights groups. They blame the simmering tensions of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in the '70s and subsequent federal backlash, for the blurring of facts in Peltier's case. Others feel, in addition to a Fargo, North Dakota jury, that he killed two agents at close range, execution style, with a .223 rifle. In June of 1975, on the 26, Special Agents Ronald Williams and Jack Coler were looking for a suspect in a local robbery named Jimmy Eagle. Spotting a vehicle known to the agents as Eagle's, they came under fire which they could not return. What the agents didn't know was that Peltier was in the vehicle. He was wanted in connection with the attempted murder of an off duty Milwaukee cop, and was currently under a fugitive warrant. Special Agent Adams arrived on the scene at Jumping Bull ranch after hearing the radio appeals of Coler and Williams. Outgunned by automatic rifles, he too, came under fire from the ranch and was pinned down. Within hours Peltier, Eagle and a few other AIM members (American Indian Movement) had successfully held off the FBI and the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) agents, keeping them bottled up on one side of highway 18. When the federals had finally regained the upper hand, coming from a BIA sharpshooter's shot between the eyes of AIM member Joe Stuntz, they discovered the bodies of the two Special Agents Williams and Coler. They had been stripped of their weapons and their jackets had been used to cover the bodies of fallen AIM members. They had been shot at close range with a .223 rifle, and one of the agents suffered a defensive wound through the hand and head killing him instantly. During the firefight, Peltier and few AIM warriors got away. In the 1970's, certain conservative elements in the Native American movements felt that too many traditional values and culture were disappearing, while an alarming, at least to them, rise in more progressive thinking was taking over the reservations. Through this thinking, AIM was born. Armed with "Traditionalist" thinking and solidarity, they challenged both the progressive tribal leadership of Dick Wilson, and the Federal presence on the Reservations. Battling Wilson's "Guardians of the Oglala Nation", GOONs for short, and BIA and FBI, the Traditionalists soon turned Pine Ridge into a battle zone, culminating with the AIM takeover of Wounded Knee. "The Knee" as it has been called locally, was the site of an 1890 massacre of Sioux women and children at the hands the U.S. Cavalry. The stand off lasted 71 days and ended with the the deaths of two AIM members. In the ensuing years, Wilson's progressives were terrorized by the Traditionals, who were in turn attacked by the GOON presence on the "Res" and in 1975, help was requested from AIM to help stave off the attacks from Wilson's GOONs. 1970's Pine Ridge was a bloody era, with over 60 unsolved murders, during AIM's reign of terror. One of the respondents to the Traditionalist's plea was Leonard Peltier, on the lam from Wisconsin after jumping bond in the attempted murder of the Milwaukee police officer. It was into this charged atmosphere that Peltier was inserting himself. It is also how he wound up being spotted near the murdered agents with the .223 rifle (an AR-15), that was forensically proven to have killed the agents. But putting the gun in Peltier's hands minutes before the agents were executed wouldn't be enough. Two other American Indian Movement members escaped with Peltier and were in a vehicle with Peltier that agents Wilson and Coler knew to be Eagle's. It is undisputed that Peltier approached the pinned down agents carrying the AR-15, along with Bob Robideau and Dino Butler. Minutes later, both agents were dead. The agents were in radio contact with law enforcement and described the trio approaching them. What is not clear is who actually killed them. After the firefight, Peltier, Robideau and Butler drove to Tent City on the Reservation in Special Agent Williams' car. Robideau, whose fingerprint was found on the car would later claim the agents were dead when they got to the car. Two weeks after the firefight, a vehicle carrying Robideau exploded on the Kansas Turnpike near Wichita. Grenades, dynamite, and a burned up AR-15 were found in the vehicle and federal authorities contended it was the one used to kill the Special Agents. Peltier was not in the vehicle in Kansas, and was found to be in Oregon, after a State Trooper nearly grabbed him after spotting him in an RV. Leonard got away, but left a bag containing one of the murdered Special Agent's weapons behind with his fingerprint on the bag. He made his way to a remote Western Canadian camp, about 160 miles west of Edmonton, Alberta, where he learned about the indictments, arrests and trial of Butler and Robideau. Subsequently arrested by the RCMP, he was moved to a Vancouver jail to await extradition. It was while fighting extradition, Peltier had a turn of bad luck; the Cedar Rapids trial of Robideau and Butler had started, the very proceeding he was fighting, and it ended with acquittals for the two AIM members. Peltier had been indicted along with them and had he waived extradition, he might have been acquitted along with them. Peltier's final appeal was rejected by the Canadians in 1976, and Leonard Peltier was transferred from Vancouver to Rapid City, South Dakota to face charges in the Special Agents' deaths. This time the Government wasn't going to make the same mistakes they did in the Cedar Rapids, Iowa, trials of Butler and Robideau. The duo were represented by William Kuntsler, the flamboyant and oratorical lawyer, who was able to paint the whole thing as self defense in a shoot out, brought on by the charged atmosphere of 1970's Pine Ridge. By limiting the scope of Peltier's Fargo, North Dakota trial to the events of 26 June, the presiding judge made the case easy for federal prosecutors to convict him under felony murder statutes. All they had to do was place Peltier at the car, and they were able to do this with witnesses who saw him, Butler, and Robideau approach the car where the agents were subsequently killed. One witness, Myrtle Poor Bear, put the .223 in Leonard's hand as the trio approached the car. In fact, Poor Bear had signed two affidavits claiming she saw Leonard Peltier approach the car with the rifle in his hands, and these two affidavits were used to convict Peltier. What wasn't produced, was a third affidavit Myrtle Poor Bear signed claiming she wasn't even there. Nor was her obvious debilitated mental state ever made an issue at Trial. In 1977, the Fargo jury convicted Leonard Peltier, and he has been in federal custody ever since. While it is accepted that Peltier was one of three who killed the agents, we will probably never know who did pull the trigger. Indeed, protected by Double Jeopardy, Robideau claims he pulled the trigger. If Peltier was at the scene, but did not pull the trigger, perhaps an expression of remorse and an admission of his role in the events 26 June 1975, along with confessing once and for all what what went on that day, he might be viewed with a little sympathy. But since no one credible is willing or maybe unable to tell the truth, it appears Peltier will remain in Canaan, PA, where he was just transferred, and not the Turtle Mountain facility in North Dakota where he had petitioned to be transferred. In keeping with harsh prison traditions, he was assaulted by a number of other inmates upon his arrival at Canaan this week. One wonders when self preservation and truth will outlive Peltier's cause celebre.