Wrongfully Convicted, Leonard Peltier Is Turning 70 in Prison

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/wrongfully-convicted-leonard-peltier-turning-70-prison



This September, Leonard Peltier will spend his 70th birthday in pain and isolation. Prisoner # 89637-132 is exactly where the FBI wants him: locked up in one of America's largest federal supermaximum prisons in Coleman, Florida.

One of America's longest-suffering political prisoners, Peltier is an Anishinabe-Lakota Native American who has wrongfully spent nearly 40 years in prison for the alleged murder of two, armed FBI agents in a shoot-out on the impoverished Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1975. Peltier was brought up on murder charges on the word of a young Indian woman whom he had never met. That woman, Myrtle Poor Bear, retracted her testimony in 2000, issuing a public statement to explain that her testimony was forced after months of abuse and intimidation at the hands of FBI agents.

Despite international outcry and an abundance of evidence that the FBI coerced, harassed, and manipulated testimony as well as ballistics evidence at Peltier's trial in 1977—and the FBI's subsequent admission that they have no idea who was actually responsible for the deaths--Peltier has been denied parole repeatedly.

In prison, Peltier has endured beatings, deprivation of medical care, inadequate nutrition, and a callous disregard for his failing health. Peltier is dying a slow, isolated death, over 2,000 miles away from his family. He has already suffered a stroke that left him nearly blind in one eye. He has had a heart attack, has a severely inflamed prostate condition, and diabetes. He is barely able to walk because of untreated bone spurs in his feet, has difficulty eating because of an ever-worsening jaw condition that began after a prison beating.

[Mercy_Queen]

1. Wrongfully convicted?

In 1999, Peltier wrote in memoirs that he participated in shooting at the FBI agents, only denying that he fired the execution-style kill shots. There was notable physical evidence of his involvement as well. There only discredited information is the shady, coerced testimony from Poor Bear.

I'll not shed any tears for a man who by his own words participated in execution style murders. The FBI agents were shot at at least 125 times, most from a high powered rifle linked back to Peltier.

[Oktober]

2. That one...