Justin Mazzola, deputy director for research at Amnesty International USA, told HuffPost the email from the FBI is not only outdated but also factually incorrect.
“Forty-five years later, this statement does not even come close to aligning with what we now know about the environment and events leading up to and on Pine Ridge that fateful day, let alone all of the information we now know about the trial and case against Leonard Peltier,” Mazzola said.
“It denies the FBI’s own role in using perjured testimony to secure his extradition from Canada, the suppression of potentially exonerating evidence by the [Department of Justice] attorneys in his case. … Even the prosecutors subsequently admitted that they have no idea who shot the agents at point-blank range,” Mazzola adds.
In 2020, Peltier’s attorney Kevin Sharp told the Tennessee Lookout that what happened to Peltier equals a “mountain of constitutional violations.” He added that the government eventually dropped the murder conviction because, through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, it turned out the FBI had withheld “damning exculpatory evidence” showing that the gun used to shoot the two agents did not belong to Peltier. Additionally, according to Sharp, several witnesses recanted their testimonies, saying, “We were threatened by the FBI. So we said we saw things that we did not see.”
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/4/20/2093042/-FBI-sends-unhinged-email-in-response-to-media-inquiry-about-the-status-of-Leonard-Peltier-s-clemency
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