By Steve Neavling
Leonard Peltier, a Lakota tribe member who was convicted of murdering two FBI agents in 1975, is asking President Biden to grant him clemency, insisting he is innocent.
Peltier, 77, has maintained he had nothing to do with the murder of the two agents on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
An all-white jury convicted him, and he was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences.
Peltier said he wants a new trial but he doesn’t want a presidential pardon because he’s innocent, NBC News reports.
“If I get into court, if the judge is fair, how are they going to answer all of that?” he said of evidence that was withheld from the 1977 trial. “I want to get a trial.”
Protesters also recently called for his release before he dies in prison.
In his first interview since 2016, he told NBC News that time is running out.
“They’re going to try and make me die here,” Peltier said by phone Wednesday from his federal prison in Central Florida, his first media interview since 2016. “I have a last few years, and I got to fight.”
Peltier’s health is deteriorating, and he was infected with COVID-19 in late January.
