My recent post about the release of the alleged "Lockerbie bomber" made me think of Leonard Peltier, and then this showed up on HuffPo today:I ask, where is the justice or the mercy in continuing to hold Peltier? I suspect that releasing Peltier -- and there is some pretty compelling evidence that he did not pull the trigger on the weapon that killed the FBI agents -- would draw attention to other prisoners being held under questionable circumstances. In fact, Amnesty International considers him a political prisoner. So holding him prisoner serves a purpose beyond a question of justice and accountability for a crime he may or may not have committed. This underscores one of the great failures of our penal system.BISMARCK, N.D. — American Indian activist Leonard Peltier, imprisoned since 1977 for the deaths of two FBI agents, has been denied parole after authorities decided that releasing him would diminish the seriousness of his crime, a federal prosecutor said Friday.
Peltier, who claims the FBI framed him, will not be eligible for parole again until July 2024, when he will be 79 years old.
2 comments:
If he was in Scotland, he'd be released, if for nothing else for the fact that he is almost blind. I spent a couple weeks on the Rosebud and Pine Ridge reservations and we met with Charlott Black Ell, the granddaugher (or maybe great granddaughter?) of Black Elk (known from the book Black ElkSpeaks). She claimed that during the time when the American Indian Movement was active, in the early 70's, there were at least 75 murders on the two reservations by the FBI. True? Judging that during that period, someone's deat was ruled caused by exposure when, in fact, their body was riddled with bullets? Gollee, if "They'd" just gone ahead and built casinos, there wouldn' have been all this "trouble". Bah! I find it hard to forgive, let alone, forget, what our government has done and is still doing. I guess that's not Quakerly, but it's hard to let go of embarrasment, hurt and anger about this and Peltier's case.
To recognize even a portion of the culpability of the U.S. government in American Indian genocide would be to open the door to enormous lawsuits and demands for reparations, don't you think? Not that it shouldn't be done. It should. It's hard to see how we will ever get beyond the atrocities that have been committed in our names.
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