Background Information on the Persecution of Leonard Peltier

Please note- this article originally appeared in ARC's Solidarite, Summer 1998

Urgent Action Required To Save The Life Of Leonard Peltier

by Kitty Bell Sparrow of the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee Canada

Internationally renowned American Indian Movement leader and political prisoner, Leonard Peltier, is suffering a slow death as a result of his 24 years of imprisonment.

Peltier was originally convicted on F.B.I. coerced, falsified and manufactured evidence, then sentenced to the Marion, Illinois federal penitentiary for two consecutive life terms. Marion State penitentiary is infamous for its "behaviour modification unit."

Peltier is plagued with a multitude of other potentially life-threatening disorders, including a condition similar to lockjaw, whereby the atrophied muscles and the jaw bones are immobilized. His teeth are therefore painfully and permanently locked a half inch apart, severely limiting his diet strictly to mashed food and liquids. Leavenworth prison officials are unwilling to accommodate his dietary needs, an act which may lead ultimately to malnourishment, or starvation.

POLITICAL PRISONER

In order for Canadian people to respond to this urgent request to become involved in a letter-writing campaign to save the life of an American Indian leader, captured on this side of the border, but unlawfully returned to the U.S., it is essential to understand how Leonard Peltier became a political prisoner.

Leonard Peltier has always maintained his innocence in the charges of murdering two F.B.I. agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota on June 26, 1975. In fact, had he been tried at the same time as his two co-accused, Dino Butler and Bob Robideau, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he would have been found innocent. However, in a devastating error, he fled to Canada in the misguided belief this country would provide asylum.

The United States government alleged Peltier had murdered two F.B.I. agents, Jack Coler and Ronald Williams, cold-bloodedly in a shootout between the two men and other members of the American Indian Movement (AIM). The shootout took place in the Pine Ridge reservation, South Dakota, where a small group of AIM members had been asked by the Lakota elders to set up a spiritual encampment to protect and teach their youth the traditional ways.

The F.B.I. contended Coler and Williams were only present on the reservation to serve a warrant to Jimmy Eagle for the theft of a $25 pair of boots, although they had no jurisdiction in this misdemeanor offense to be on reservation land.

Witnesses to the shootings, on the other hand, steadfastly maintained it was the two agents who had driven separately at high speed into the Jumping Bull Hill area of Pine Ridge, parked their cars in a "V" angle meant to provide optimum defense and started shooting up the village. Some defensive gunfire was returned. However, Peltier was among the group to lead some of the youngsters to safety.

In the Vancouver Supreme court month-long extradition hearing, which began May 13, 1976, a lawyer from the Canadian Justice Department, the late Paul Halprin represented the United States government's interests as part of the Canada-U.S. extradition treaty agreement. On their behalf, Halprin presented four affidavits to substantiate numerous crimes allegedly committed by Peltier.

The two most incriminating depositions were the Myrtle Poor Bear affidavits, dated Feb. 23, 1976, and March 31, 1976. The two documents, presented by Halprin to the court, were asserted to be the true statements of Poor Bear who claimed that, as his girlfriend she was present with Peltier and an eyewitness to his murder of the two F.B.I. agents.

The third affidavit was from the police department of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, charging Peltier with attempting to murder one of their police officers. And the fourth sworn statement was from two Oregon State Police officers alleging the AIM leader had shot at them.

MYRTLE POOR BEAR AFFIDAVITS

Shortly after the extradition proceedings in Vancouver, Peltier's two co- accused, Dino Butler and Bob Robideau, stood trial in Cedar Rapids, Iowa for their part in the alleged murders of Coler and Williams. As a result of the disclosure of all documents during their trial, a third affidavit of Myrtle Poor Bear, dated Feb. 21, 1976, surfaced. This additional affidavit pre-dated the two documents Halprin presented in the Canadian court and flagrantly contradicted them. The Feb. 19th Poor Bear deposition clearly stated she was not an eyewitness to the alleged murders and was nowhere near the area of the incident.Instead, she claimed she had only been told by Peltier much later that he had shot and killed the two F.B.I. agents. This affidavit was, in fact, the first and original statement given by her to Canadian authorities and it contained none of the two later alleged eyewitness accounts of the murders. Peltier's defense lawyers only learned of the Feb.19, 1976 written testimony after Peltier's extradition.

At the time of their introduction by Halprin as evidence to the court, Peltier immediately advised his two lawyers he had never even heard of Myrtle Poor Bear. The justice system had taken advantage of one of the major flaws of the Canada/U.S. extradition treaty which permits evidence to be presented by affidavits only, without benefit of cross examination in person of the accusers. Without the defense knowledge of the pre-existing Poor Bear affidavit and the inability to question her in person under oath in the Canadian court, Peltier's lawyers could not disprove her written evidence. The two depositions Halprin presented gave such a grisly and savage picture of the murders, they weighed heavily against Peltier.

Meanwhile, Butler and Robideau had the benefit of a change of venue for their trial to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Additionally their defense lawyers were allowed to present the broadest scope of evidence, including the background of the violence-ridden Pine Ridge reservation, ongoing since the 1973 Wounded Knee uprising which left dozens of unsolved murders of traditional tribal members or AIM supporters; and establishing the unrelenting misconduct of the F.B.I. With the benefit of a full defense and a fair trial, Butler and Robideau were acquitted of all charges.

Peltier's Canadian lawyers ultimately received the Feb. 19, 1976 Poor Bear affidavit and with this new evidence, the two lawyers appealed the decision to the B.C. Court of Appeal, but were turned down. The appeal's court justices concluded that irrespective of the false Poor Bear affidavits, there was still justifiable cause of Peltier's extradition due to the remaining two prima facie cases established regarding the charges in Wisconsin and Oregon.

TRIAL IN FARGO, NORTH DAKOTA

When Peltier ultimately went to trial in Fargo, North Dakota, the original judge, believed to be too liberal, was replaced with the chosen hardline, arch-conservative U.S. District Judge Paul Benson, known to be favorable to the F.B.I.

Benson's prejudice was clearly demonstrated by his refusal to allow nearly 80 per cent of all evidence presented by Peltier's defense to be heard by the all-white jury. They were excused the majority of the defense's time, while only Benson heard and decided what could be presented to the jury members. In the United States justice system, as in Canada, the court procedure permits witnesses to testify in what is termed as an "offer of proof" without the jury's presence, with the presiding judge deciding whether or not the jury will hear the evidence presented.

While the prosecution was able to call upon 25 separate witnesses, not one of whom saw the shootout, Judge Benson disallowed the majority of the defense witnesses' accounts. Benson had ruled against admitting into evidence anything before or after the one day of June 26, 1975 when agents Williams and Coler died. This single ruling by Benson so thoroughly limited the scope of admissable evidence by the defense, it guaranteed Peltier's conviction by ruling out all the crucial testimony that could have demonstrated the evidence was coerced, manufactured or manipulated by the F.B.I.

Crucial testimony heard only by Benson, and then ruled inadmissable to the jury includes the recanting testimony of Wilford Draper, a 15-year-old Navajo, who earlier testified for the state prosecution, with the jury present, as to the type of gun Peltier had at the time of the shootout. Later, when Draper was produced as a witness for the defense, Benson dismissed the jury to decide whether or not the young Navajo's unperjured statements could be heard by them.

Draper recanted his earlier testimony and described how he had been coerced by F.B.I. agents who arrested him without charges and proceeded to interrogate him in front of his mother. Initially he refused to cooperate with the F.B.I. agents' demands to implicate Peltier, but one agent, Gary Adams, threatened to charge the young man with the same crime unless he collaborated with them.

Draper was forced into a swivel chair, with his hands cuffed behind his back, and whirled around for hours while his mother kept screaming for him to cooperate. He testified he finally broke and agreed to say anything the F.B.I. told him to say. In his testimony for the defense, Draper stated he did not know one gun from another and that his earlier evidence for the prosecution regarding Peltier's gun and whereabouts at the time of the shootout, had originated from the F.B.I.

Due to the rigid limitations of Benson's ruling that only evidence relating to the severely restricted boundaries of the single day that Williams and Coler died, the jury heard Draper's prosecutorial testimony, but not a word of his statements of how he had been forced to take the stand against Peltier.

But his restrictive ruling, excluding any and all evidence to the single date, applied only to Peltier's defense. The prosecution, had free reign to guarantee a guilty verdict. Judge Benson allowed Evan Hultman, head of the prosecution to introduce the attempted murder charges of a Milwaukee policeman and the two Oregon officers in a brazen attempt to prove to the jury that Peltier was a rabid, psychopathic cop-killer.

The most disturbing aspect of these charges being used at all during both the Canadian extradition hearings and the Fargo trial, is that Peltier was not convicted in either of these two States for any of their charges!

At another point in the Fargo trial, a badly burned AR15 semi-automatic was introduced into evidence as being Peltier's weapon. A Los Angeles forensic expert testified it was bullets from this gun that killed Coler and Williams. What the prosecution did not admit, however, is why they had to fly a California expert all the way to Fargo, South Dakota. It was only after the trial ended with Peltier's conviction, that his defense team was able to obtain documents under the Freedom of Information Act. Within those hidden files it was discovered two local forensic experts had both tested the gun and concluded there was absolutely no way the weapon, alleged to be Peltier's, was the one that killed the two agents. When both experts refused to testify otherwise, the F.B.I. expanded their search for another expert who would swear to the court precisely what they needed in order to convict Leonard Peltier.

Judge Benson's bias was again made obvious when the defense called for Myrtle Poor Bear to testify regarding the role of the F.B.I. in preparing her three affidavits for Peltier's extradition.

The jury was again dismissed while Poor Bear testified F.B.I. agents David Price and William Woods held her "incommunicado". Poor Bear swore she had no idea as to the contents of the three affidavits which she was forced to sign. She told the court the F.B.I. agents showed her gruesome photos of an autopsy performed on a Micmac Indian woman from Canada, Anna Mae Aquash, who was an AIM member.

Aquash was not present on the day Coler and Williams died, although she was later questioned by the F.B.I. and warned she might not live out the year. She did disappear later, but her body was not discovered until February of the following year beneath a bank of thawing snow. She was buried quickly in an unmarked grave, with cause of death listed as having "frozen to death." The F.B.I. had cut off her hands and sent them to their Washington D.C. headquarters for identification, Once identified, her family went to South Dakota to recover her remains, intending to re-bury her according to the traditional ways. Prior to this, though, they had a private autopsy performed which identified the cause of death: a bullet right through the back of the head, shot at close range.

Poor Bear testified that even though Aquash's remains had not yet been identified, agents Woods and Price constantly referred to her as "that AIM bitch." And throughout the eight months she was held in custody by the F.B.I., the agents continually threatened her with the same fate and eventually the life of her daughter.

VITAL EVIDENCE SUPPRESSED

The exclusion of Draper's and Poor Bear's evidence are but two illlustrations to indicate how 80 per cent of the most vital evidence to prove Peltier's innocence was suppressed.

While Butler and Robideau were granted a fair trial, Leonard Peltier's lawyers were not allowed to expose the heavy concentration of diverse law enforcement officers spread out all over the Pine Ridge reservation from the very beginning of that day.

In order to assemble the vast array of military and law enforcement officers, they would have unquestionably worked out the strategic planning much earlier and begun to assemble long before the time the two F.B.I. special agents were shot at. These facts, however, only stimulate further questioning regarding any rationale for the eruption of para-military actions. The only logical conclusion was the most obvious: the never-ending, historically based greed of the invaders for Indian lands.

THEFT OF INDIAN LANDS

What else but lust for Indian lands and their resources could reproduce such similarities to the 500-year-old struggle to defend what little land has ultimately been left to them? The mid-seventies OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) oil crisis was reason enough for then President Jimmy Carter to call for solutions regarding essential resources for the U.S. President Carter formally declared there would be certain areas throughout the country that would have to be declared "national sacrifice areas" in the "moral equivalent of war."

Due to population expansion and abuse of non-sustainable resources, 70 per cent of the remaining resource-rich lands were located on Indian reservations throughout the country. In particular, the Oglala lands contain uranium, natural gas deposits and other resource rich supplies, untapped by them as a result of their sacred relationship to the lands of their peoples.

Tribal Chairman Dick Wilson unilaterally signed away an eighth of the Pine Ridge reservation for uranium and other resource extraction on the day of the shoutout. To avoid the natural consequence for his illegal act, by way of retaliatory measures from the traditional peoples, it had to have been deemed essential to distract and divert their attention elsewhere. And there was no doubt the men and women of the American Indian Movement would be fully supportive of the traditional people in their desire to defend their lands.

CANADIAN COMPLICITY

A prosecution witness, F.B.I. Special Agent David Price gave the first hint of the Canadian Justice Department's complicity in the falsification of the Myrtle Poor Bear affidavits. Price testified that lawyer Paul Halprin, the Crown Counsel assigned by the Canadian Justice Department to represent F.B.I. investigation into the deaths of Coler and Williams at Pine Ridge went there to assist in formulating the second and third Poor Bear affidavits, dated Feb. 23 and March 31, 1976. This was done because the first affidavit signed Feb. 19 and sent to the Vancouver division of the Justice Department allegedly did not conform in format to the Canadian evidentiary requirements for extradition.

Yet the facts clearly show there was a major alteration and addition of information in the second and third affidavits which totally contradicted the first. Poor Bear's first statement declared she was not at the shootout. By the time Halprin was in Rapid City that version was retracted. The subsequent affidavits, formulated by Halprin while in Rapid City, claim she was Peltier's girlfriend and was beside him while he ruthlessly murdered the F.B.I. agents.

At the very least, Halprin had known about the first Poor Bear affidavit throughout the entire extradition hearing he conducted on behalf of the U.S. government while Peltier was still in Canada. He withheld this very pertinent information. By not disclosing his knowledge of the original Poor Bear affidavit, Halprin guaranteed Peltier's inability to have a fair hearing in Canada!

In order for the Canadian reporter, Kitty Bell Sparrow, from The Indian Voice to write an exact summary of Peltier's Fargo trial, daily copies of the trial transcripts were obtained to supplement notes taken throughout the proceedings. Inexplicably, though, the transcript of agent Price's testimony on Halprin's key role in formulating the Poor Bear affidavits was for some reason "unavailable". After requesting a copy be sent to her office in Vancouver, the transcript arrived in Canada two weeks later. Without any explanation given, agent Price's testimony relating the extent of Halprin's involvement was completely garbled.

Nevertheless, when the reporter returned to Vancouver, she phoned the office of Stuart Rush, one of Peltier's senior defense lawyers representing him throughout the series of hearings and appeals. She informed one of the junior lawyers in Rush's firm, Peter Grant, of Price's statements implicating Halprin as the author of Poor Bear's 2nd and 3rd affidavits, which Halprin introduced in Canada as the only affidavits provided to him.

Grant then phoned The Vancouver Sun, and informed the paper that according to Price's testimony, Halprin had assisted in composing the two false affidavits. The newspaper repinted a major story on it and Halprin ended up filing suit against both The Vancouver Sun and Grant for slander.

The Honourable Justice Anderson, of the British Columbia Supreme Court, presided at the trial. His pivotal ruling that the United States was guilty of misconduct by falsifying the Poor Bear affidavits was the first judicial recognition there was illegal evidence constructed to prosecute Peltier. As a result of Justice Anderson's findings, Halprins' defamation suit was dismissed.

Back in the U.S., all of Peltier's requests for appeal have been denied.

MILWAUKEE CHARGE

The primary case in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, finally went to trial January, 1978. The charges were "The State of Wisconsin versus Leonard Peltier,"alleging that on Nov. 22, 1973, Peltier attempted to kill two plain clothes police officers, Ronald Hlavinka and James Ecles.

The trial was going badly for the defense until Belle Anne Gild, Hlavinka's former fiancé, surprisingly showed up to testify for the defense. She swore under oath that the day after the incident, a jubilant Hlavinka told her he had caught a big Indian.Gild asked if it was Russell Means or Dennis Banks, but he informed her it was Leonard Peltier. He then pulled out an F.B.I. picture of Peltier from his files. Her testimony on the connection between Hlavinka and the F.B.I. gave the appearance the federal agency had targetted Peltier and that Hlavinka was their instrument.The entire Milwaukee case against Peltier was dismissed.

OREGON CHARGE

The final prima facie case alleged by the Canadian justice system to prove justifiable grounds for Peltier's extradition was contained in the affidavits by the two Oregon police officers. In their signed depositions to the Canadian Justice Department, they swore Peltier had shot at them. The case could not be brought to trial.

Yet the Canadian extradition of Peltier depended solely on these affidavits and throughout the Fargo trial, the St. Louis Appeals court, the Milwaukee case, and up until the final Oregon charges were dismissed, they were used by the prosecution to endlessly portray Peltier as a dedicated "cop killer."

But, anyone who has come to know the real Leonard Peltier -- even now, after 22 years of rising above the suffering inflicted on him -- knows there is no killer lurking within. He is, first and foremost, a leader who places the needs of his people above his and consistently, tirelessly, works to unite all peoples for the common good of humanity.

POLITICAL REMEDY

This cover-up of crucial information proves the F.B.I. manipulated the evidence, manifests Canada's reluctance to be involved in a dispute with the United States over the violation of its justice system and its sovereignty. However, in part responding to the inquiries of millions of peoples over the years from Canada and worldwide; a Supreme Court of Canada suggestion in 1989 for a political remedy and recommendation of a ministerial review by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, Canada's then Minister of Justice Allan Rock finally agreed to a departmental review of the extradition in April, 1994.On October 14, 1999, Justice Minister Anne McLellan completed the government's internal review shirking responsibility for Canada having authorized a fraudulent extradition.

It is important for each person to send in their demand to the Prime Minister of Canada is our hope that in reading this overview, particularly noting Canada's role at the time of the extradition, and this country's stunning lack of response to the mounting evidence of fraud over the past 24 years, that we can all raise our voices in a Canada-wide and worldwide demand for Leonard Peltier's freedom.

The Leonard Peltier Defence Committee Canada is also requesting that people send a letter to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien requesting Canada's urgent recommendation for presidential clemency.

All letters should stipulate that due to the U.S. violation of the Canada-U.S. Extradiction Treaty.

Letters should be addressed to:

The Hon. Jean Chrétien

Prime Minister of Canada

201 Langevin Block, 80 Wellington St.

Ottawa, ON K1A OH8

Fax: (613) 954-0811

For more information, contact:

Leonard Peltier Defence Committee Canada

43 Chandler Dr.,

Scarborough, ON M1G 1Z1

Ph/fax: (416) 439-1893

email: lpdccfd@web.net

Kitty Bell Sparrow (the original Indian Voice reporter in 1976) with the assistance of her daughter, Kathleen Bell Younger & Anne Dreaver of the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee Canada, Scarborough, Ontario. Mrs. Sparrow lives in Vancouver, BC. She is a member of the advisory counsel of the Canadian LPDC.