By Owei Lakemfa
President Joe Biden within seven weeks from December 1, 2024, granted over 2,500 pardons including for his son, Robert Hunter Biden.
Hunter had been convicted on a nine-count charge for tax felony amounting to $1.4 million, evading tax assessment and filing false tax returns. He faced a maximum 17 years in prison. His sentencing was scheduled for December 16, 2024. But fifteen days before, Biden not only pardoned his son, but also granted him immunity from additional or new charges that can be brought against him especially by the Trump administration. It stated that Hunter has immunity: “For those offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014, through December 1, 2024”
His predecessor and successor, President Donald Trump in one day, on January 20, 2025, issued over 1,500 pardons. Both men within seven weeks granted over 4,000 pardons. The process the two political rivals are basically abusing, is the power of pardon granted the United States, US President under Article II Section 2, Clause 1 of the American constitution. This provides that: “The President…shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of impeachment.”
However, there remains a problem Trump still needs to solve over the Capitol Hill violent invaders against whom he claims “a grave national injustice” had been perpetrated. The US Constitution grants the President power to pardon people convicted, but not power to halt on-going trials. Now, some of the judges have merely dismissed the cases. This leaves open the possibility that charges can brought against the accused in future. There are still some 300 such cases pending which judges might be holding up or delaying. Perhaps Trump can learn from Biden granting his son immunity from any prosecution.
Biden with his total 8,064 pardons granted from 2021 -2025 holds the record of granting the most pardons in US history. While the pardons granted this week by Trump, were basically to free convicted criminals who levied war against the state in an attempt to reverse the 2020 Presidential Elections which he had lost, some of the pardons by Biden were to correct cases of historical injustice the White establishment had visited on American Indians and African Americans in its bid to maintain supremacy and dominance over the country.
I first heard the name, Leonard Peltier on August 12, 2024 at the International Conference to End Colonialism In The World which was held in Abuja. The Opening Address was from Puerto Rican freedom fighter, Oscar Lopez Riveria who had spent 38 years in US jails. I had remarked that Africa’s Nelson Mandela had spent 27 years in jail and that as far as I knew, Riveria had been the longest serving political prisoner in history. But Kazi Toure, of the International People’s Senate National Jericho Movement, USA and, former US political prisoner, corrected me. He told me about the then 79-year old Indigenous American Indian freedom fighter called Leonard Peltier who was in his 49th year in US jails.
Peltier was serving two life sentences for allegedly killing two Federal Bureau of Investigation, FBI agents, Jack Coler and Ronald Williams on June 26, 1975 in a shootout on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. The immediate dispute was over the Indians insistence on self-determination and, Native Treaty Rights. The agents had gone to serve arrest warrants. The American state and system including the FBI knew Peltier was innocent of the crimes. The FBI had forensic evidence proving that the shots that took the lives of the officers did not come from Peltier’s gun, but chose to suppress the fact at the trial. It also manufactured fake affidavits and distorted facts.
Peltier had been denied parole including at a July, 2024 hearing and, was not eligible again for parole until 2026. He was a leader of the American Indian Movement, AIM which the state wanted to destroy. AIM had in 1973 taken over the village of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation. This led to a 71-day standoff with federal security forces. The increased clashes led to the face off two year later for which Peltier was sent to prison.
The injustice done to Peltier had turned him into the symbol of the indigenous peoples’ resistance and a living legend. It was for this and the insistence by the FBI for a pound of flesh from the American Indian people, that saw him spend half a century wasting in prison. Appeals by international figures including Nelson Mandela, Pope Francis, Bishop Desmond Tutu and the actor, Robert Redford did not move the American establishment.
As the Biden era was winding up, the local and international activists who for decades had pushed for presidential pardon, decided to make a last second push. On Wednesday, January 15, 2025, Kazi posted an appeal by freedom activists titled “Tell Biden: FREE Leonard Peltier!” The appeal was that people should call President Biden that day and the next on 2024561111 or text the White House on 302404 0880 with the simple message: “Grant Leonard Peltier Clemency” I thought the campaigners for a last second clemency were simply optimists.
I did not think a Biden would have the courage to grant Peltier pardon especially when the FBI and the establishment were openly opposed. In fact, FBI Director, Christopher Asher Wray wrote Biden this month saying that Peltier must not be granted clemency. He repeated the false claim that: “Peltier is a ruthless murderer who has shown a complete lack of remorse for his many crimes.”
But as Biden was handing over power to Trump on Monday, January 20, 2025, the White House issued a statement that Peltier was now a free man! He is to be released from a Florida federal detention on February 18, 2025. Biden’s release of Peltier, is a healing process for the indigenous American Indian people who have faced genocide. Another healing process Biden set off was his posthumous pardon for Pan African Prophet Marcus Garvey who was falsely accused in 1923 of mail fraud.
Garvey who wanted to unite all Black people in the world, had set up empowerment businesses. When one of them, the large Black Star shipping line collapsed, the racist American establishment used that as an excuse to charge him with “mail fraud” over the sale of the company’s shares. Using a corrupt judicial system, he was railroaded into prison. His connived conviction was then used in December 1, 1927 to deport him to his native Jamaica. Pardons in the US have essentially become weapons to be wielded for political purposes rather than to further the aims of justice.
