20 July 1979: Leonard Peltier escapes
About this episode
This episode discusses the escape of Native American political prisoner Leonard Peltier from prison and the surrounding legal controversies.
On this day, 20 July 1979, Native American political prisoner Leonard Peltier escaped from Lompoc Federal Correctional Institution, in California, with two other detainees, one of whom, Bobby Gene Garcia, was shot to death by a guard. Peltier, a leading member of the American Indian Movement, had been sentenced to two consecutive life sentences for the deaths of two Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents. He had been warned by fellow Native American prisoner Standing Deer (a.k.a. Robert Wilson) that there was contract on his life in the prison. Peltier’s original trial was riddled with inconsistencies and distortions. For example, an FBI ballistics expert claimed during the trial that a shell case found near the bodies matched Peltier’s rifle, but his report stating that the cartridge did not match was withheld from the jury. And three witnesses who placed Peltier near the scene of the crime later recanted, stating that the FBI had tied them to chairs and coerced their testimony. The legal misconduct was so severe that Peltier has received support from individuals and groups as diverse as Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the European Parliament, and the United…
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