Leonard Peltier - Post-trial Debate

Post-trial Debate

Peltier's conviction sparked great controversy and has drawn criticism from a number of sources. Numerous appeals have been filed on his behalf; none of the resulting rulings has been made in his favor. Peltier is considered by the AIM to be a political prisoner and has received support from individuals and groups including Nelson Mandela, Rigoberta Menchú, Amnesty International, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, Tenzin Gyatso (the 14th Dalai Lama), the European Parliament, the Belgian Parliament, the Italian Parliament, the Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Rev. Jesse Jackson.

Peltier's supporters have given two different rationales for overturning the conviction. One argument asserts that Peltier did not commit the murders, and that he either had no knowledge of the murders (as he told CNN in 1999), or that he has knowledge implicating others which he will never reveal, or (as told in Peter Matthiessen's In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (book), 1983) that he approached and searched the agents but did not execute them. The other rationale holds that the murders (no matter who committed them) occurred during a war-like atmosphere on the reservation in which FBI agents were terrorizing residents in the wake of the Wounded Knee Incident in 1973.

The film Incident at Oglala (1992) included the AIM activist Robert Robideau saying the FBI agents had been shot by a 'Mr X'. When Peltier was interviewed about 'Mr X', he said he knew who the man was. In 1995 Dino Butler, in an interview with E.K. Caldwell of News From Indian Country, said that 'Mr X' had been invented as the murderer in an attempt to achieve Peltier's release. In a News From Indian Country interview with Bernie Lafferty in 2001, she said that she had witnessed Peltier's referring to his murder of one of the Agents.