NCJ Number
168154
Date Published
1996
Length
3 pages
Annotation
American Indian activist Leonard Peltier lost his third bid for a new murder trial when the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the request.
Abstract
Peltier, who has been in prison for 17 years, is serving two consecutive life terms for the murders of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota in 1975. Federal authorities maintain that Peltier and the other men wounded agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams in an ambush and then shot them in the head at close range. Peltier and his codefendants argued that they did not know Coler and Williams were Federal agents and that they fired on them in self-defense. In the appeal, defense lawyers asserted that prosecutors initially pinned Peltier as the triggerman, but later backed off, viewing him as an accomplice. The court, however, rejected this assertion and ruled that the government tried the case on alternative theories that proposed that "Peltier personally killed the agents at point-blank range, but that if he had not done so, then he was equally guilty of their murder as an aider or abettor." Defense attorneys also argued that Peltier was denied a fair trial because of government misconduct. The court, however, held that those issues had either been argued in previous appeals or could have been. Bruce Ellison, one of Peltier's attorneys, said he would either petition the Eighth Circuit for another hearing or petition the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to rehear Peltier's case in 1978 and again in 1986.