On January 20, 2025 — his last day in office, minutes before the inauguration of his successor — President Joe Biden commuted the sentence of Leonard Peltier.

Not pardoned. Commuted. The distinction matters more than anyone in power will admit.

A pardon says: we were wrong. A commutation says: you can go home. One is justice. The other is mercy dressed as a favor. Leonard Peltier received the favor. After forty-eight years.

He was eighty years old. He had spent more than half his life — nearly all of his adult life — inside federal prisons. The NDN Collective purchased a home for him in Belcourt, North Dakota, on the Turtle Mountain Reservation. He walked out of a federal prison in Florida on February 18, 2025. He will serve the remainder of his sentence — the sentence that was supposed to end only when he did — in home confinement. The ankle monitor replaced the cell. The walls got bigger. The conviction stayed.

Here is what happened.

On June 26, 1975, two FBI agents — Jack Coler and Ronald Williams — followed a vehicle onto the Jumping Bull compound on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. A shootout erupted. Both agents were killed. One AIM member, Joe Stuntz, was also killed. No one was ever charged with Stuntz’s death.

Pine Ridge in 1975 was not a reservation. It was an occupied territory. Tribal chairman Dick Wilson had created a private militia — the Guardians of the Oglala Nation, acronym GOON, a name they chose themselves — to suppress opposition. Between 1973 and 1976, at least 60 opponents of Wilson’s government were murdered on Pine Ridge. The FBI, which had jurisdiction on the reservation, investigated none of these deaths with the urgency it would later bring to the deaths of its own agents.

The traditional Lakota communities asked AIM to come. Not to start a war. To survive one.

Three AIM members were charged with the agents’ deaths: Dino Butler, Bob Robideau, and Leonard Peltier. Butler and Robideau were tried first, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The jury acquitted both men, accepting the argument of self-defense. In the context of Pine Ridge in 1975 — the GOONs, the murders, the federal indifference — the jury found it reasonable that AIM members would shoot back.

Leonard Peltier had fled to Canada. He was extradited on the basis of affidavits from a woman named Myrtle Poor Bear, who claimed to be Peltier’s girlfriend and to have witnessed him shoot the agents. Poor Bear later recanted, stating the FBI had threatened her and her children to coerce the testimony. She had never been Peltier’s girlfriend. She had not been at the Jumping Bull compound that day. The judge who signed the extradition order, Judge Hall of Canada, later said he would not have granted extradition had he known the affidavits were false.

Peltier was tried separately, in Fargo, North Dakota — a different venue, a different judge, a different jury pool. The self-defense argument that freed Butler and Robideau was restricted. The jury convicted. On June 1, 1977, he received two consecutive life sentences.

In the decades that followed, the case accumulated the weight of its own contradictions. Amnesty International called for his release, citing concerns about trial fairness. Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the European Parliament, the Belgian Parliament, the Italian Parliament, the Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights — all called for clemency or a new trial. The prosecution’s own statements evolved. U.S. Attorney Lynn Crooks admitted in an Eighth Circuit hearing: “We can’t prove who shot those agents.”

They couldn’t prove it. They didn’t need to. The conviction held.

FBI Director Christopher Wray, in his final days before Biden left office, wrote a letter of “vehement and steadfast opposition” to the commutation. The FBI Agents Association called Biden’s decision “cowardly.” They invoked the memory of agents Coler and Williams. They did not invoke the memory of Joe Stuntz, or the sixty murdered Oglalas, or Myrtle Poor Bear’s coerced testimony, or the Canadian judge who said he’d been deceived.

This is what a commutation does: it opens the door without cleaning the room.

Leonard Peltier is home. He has an ankle monitor and a house in Belcourt that people who believed in him bought for him. He told Democracy Now! in September 2025: “We still have to live under that, that fear of losing our identity, losing our culture, our religion… I’m not going to give up.”

He is not going to give up. He also cannot give up the conviction, because no one with the power to remove it has chosen to. Biden could have pardoned him. He chose not to. The mercy was calibrated: enough to satisfy the advocates, not enough to anger the FBI. Enough to say “he’s old, let him go.” Not enough to say “we were wrong.”

The United States government has never said “we were wrong” about Pine Ridge. Not about the GOONs it funded. Not about the sixty dead. Not about the coerced testimony. Not about the extradition built on lies. Not about trying the same case twice and getting a different result in a friendlier courtroom.

In the Thunderheart version of this story, the FBI agent discovers the truth and turns against his own. In the real version, the FBI agent writes a letter saying don’t let the old man out.

Leonard Peltier spent 17,520 days in prison. That’s 48 years. He entered at 32. He left at 80. Everything between those numbers — every meal, every sleep, every season — happened inside a cell, for a crime the prosecution admitted it couldn’t prove he committed, on testimony the witnesses said was coerced, under an extradition a judge said he’d been tricked into granting.

The commutation is not justice. It is the absence of cruelty’s continuation. There is a difference, and the difference is the distance between a pardon and an ankle monitor.

“I’m not going to give up.”

He shouldn’t have had to say that from a living room in Belcourt at eighty years old. He shouldn’t have had to say it at all.

// NEON BLOOD

Sources: Famous Trials: Leonard Peltier, NPR, NPR (FBI opposition), Britannica, Amnesty International, NDN Collective, Democracy Now!, Wikipedia: Leonard Peltier