CNN
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In one of his final acts before leaving office, former President Joe Biden commuted the life sentence of indigenous activist Leonard Peltier, convicted of killing two FBI agents in 1975.
Peltier, 80, will serve the remainder of his sentence at home.
“It’s finally over – I’m going home,” Peltier said in a statement shared by NDN Collective, a South Dakota native rights group. “I want to show the world that I am a good person with a good heart. I want to help people, just like my grandmother taught me.
Peltier was denied parole last year. At his parole hearing, Peltier’s lawyers highlighted his failing health, age and nonviolent record during his nearly 50 years in prison.
He has always maintained his innocence in the shooting deaths of the officers. Jack Coler and Ronald Williams were killed in a shooting on June 26, 1975, while searching for a robbery suspect on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
The agents went to the reservation to execute arrest warrants, the AP reported, and were injured in the shootout and then shot in the head, the FBI said.
In 1977, Peltier was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to two consecutive life sentences.
“I didn’t kill those agents, I didn’t see who killed those agents, and if I knew, I wouldn’t say it. But I don’t know. That’s the problem,” Peltier told former CNN correspondent Mark Potter in 1999.
Peltier said he fired shots during the shooting, but “I know I didn’t hit them.” I know not.
CNN has reached out to the FBI Agents Association for comment. Last year, the group applauded the parole board’s decision to deny Peltier’s request for parole.
In the 1970s, Peltier was a leader of the American Indian Movement, which took over the village of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation, the Associated Press reported. The takeover led to a 71-day standoff with federal agents and lasting tensions between the movement and the government.
NDN Collective previously described Peltier as “America’s longest-serving Indigenous political prisoner.”