Partial amnesty for Leonard Peltier is insufficient, belated scramble to appeal to masses

Jan. 27, 2025

On the last full day of his presidency, Joe Biden granted partial amnesty for Leonard Peltier, a political prisoner who has so far served 46 years of his unjust two consecutive life sentences. It is imperative to stress that Peltier is not granted full clemency, he is simply remanded to house arrest for the remainder of his life. A rare breach in the merciless, ironclad face of the bourgeois legal apparatus, but ultimately characteristic of the Biden presidency: The art of the delayed half-measure. It is a consolation to the oppressed, before the shambling state rears up again for sweeping repression and intensified exploitation under the Trump administration.

Leonard Peltier is a veteran of the American Indian Movement (AIM), a political organization of Indigenous Americans struggling for undeniable autonomy, pan-indigenous nationalism, and civil rights. In the 1970s, a time of great advances in the global class struggle as well as in America, the US government, spearheaded by the FBI, launched a series of brutal reprisals, infiltration, and persecutions against various revolutionary organizations in the US, such as the Brown Berets, the Black Panther Party, and the American Indian Movement among many others. Leonard Peltier, a worker and activist, organizing and supporting many protests in Seattle, WA (such as those in solidarity of the famous Wounded Knee Occupation), was already a persecuted and targeted member of AIM when he was charged with the murder of two FBI agents in a shootout in the Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota in 1975.

Lasting two years, protests raged at the time over the gross misconduct of Peltier’s trial, including the absence of any eyewitness, the misrepresentation of ballistics evidence, a biased jury, the withholding of key evidence, and an unlawful extradition of Peltier who fled to Canada, allegedly convinced he would never receive a fair trial in the United States. These glaring issues have been ignored by every single presidential administration, every court, every Congress since Peltier was convicted on these two charges to life imprisonment, with explicit denials of pardons from both George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

We in the American Party of Labor herald even this belated, insufficient and desperate “clemency” by that Democratic faction, but we see it in the end as a scramble to appeal to the masses, the plea of moribund liberalism. The decades of maintaining a political prisoner in the “freest country in the world” is another unassailable proof that as long as this machine of bourgeois society exists, absolutely none of us are free. However, the heroism and determination of Peltier and his comrades, and ours, inspire us to declare that until we are free, until there are no more martyrs as Peltier and Fred Hampton and countless others, that machine will be shut down and tossed into the waste where it belongs.

Solidarity with Leonard Peltier!
Free All Political Prisoners!
Revolutionaries are criminals only in an unjust system!

For the Secretariat,

Camilo Lazo
National Chair,
American Party of Labor