[News] Leonard Peltier: Cruel and unusual punishment

[News at freedomarchives.org]

CRUEL AND UNUSUAL PUNISHMENT:
IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

By
Leonard Peltier

Amendment VIII.  Excessive bail shall not be required, nor
excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual
punishments inflicted.


The Eighth Amendment is supposed to be about dignity,
humanity and decency.  It is intended to prohibit
*deliberate indifference to serious infliction of unnecessary
or wanton pain or physical torture or lingering death*.  The
Eighth Amendment, I'm told, should reflect the standards
of a *maturing* society and your correctional system
shouldn't be just about depriving people of freedom, but
rehabilitation.

But that is not how it works for me or many other
prisoners.  Protection against *cruel and unusual
punishment* has faded away as have the rights of ordinary
citizens under such things as the Patriot Act and Homeland
Security.  More and more information about FBI
misconduct has come to light recently.  Our government
continues to fabricate and/or withhold evidence.  They do
this not to *protect and serve,* but for political gain.

Prison is a very cruel reality.  But unusual?  Imprisonment
has become a common experience, especially among
Native Americans.  There are now approximately 3 million
people in United States prisons.

The Constitution protects against *cruel and unusual
punishment,* and, therefore, if the Constitution has
meaning, then you, as citizens, MUST care.  To ignore the
cruel and extreme conditions prisoners endure --
overcrowding, poor medical care, and unhealthy conditions
-- is to return to a way that the Eighth Amendment was
intended to end.

The courts say prison officials have to have acted with
*deliberate indifference* to the safety, health and welfare
of prisoners for punishment to be considered cruel and
unusual.  I don't know what this means because *deliberate
indifference* is a way of life in prison.  Imagine suffering
a stroke, as I did, and slowly losing part of your sight in an
environment where all of your senses are required for
survival; or suffering extreme jaw pain for years, until the
United Nations forced your government to stop the torture
and provide the necessary health care.

There are other ways prisoners are deprived of their
humanity.  In many prisons, we Native Americans are not
allowed to practice our spiritual beliefs and traditions, as if
separation from the earth with which we are one -- as
stewards, not owners -- were not punishment enough.

The Eighth Amendment prohibits arbitrary and
disproportionate punishments, too.  The normal Federal
guideline for prisoners convicted of homicide offenses is
200+ months.  This means that I should have been released
from prison over a decade ago.  The U.S. Parole
Commission refuses to consider the possibility of my
receiving parole until at least December 2008 -- when I will
have served double the normal time -- and there is no
guarantee that I will be paroled even then.  This
disproportionate sentence is particularly cruel and unusual
because there is no basis to support the Commission's
reasons for doubling my time for parole consideration.  The
Commission explains its departure from its own
congressionally mandated guidelines by saying that I was
involved in an *ambush* of two FBI agents and that I
executed them at point blank range after the agents had
been incapacitated.  There's no evidence to support those
findings and there never was.  The government attorneys
have even admitted that they do not know who shot the
agents.

The Commission's ruling is not supported by my
convictions, which the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals
upheld on an aiding and abetting theory.  That was a shift
in the government's position after we discovered the
government withheld evidence that undercut their case.  I
was never tried on aiding and abetting and there is no
evidence that I knowingly aided and abetted in the
shooting of the two agents.

I can tell you I didn't intend (nor did I) shoot anyone.  My
only crime was that I defended my People from attack.  In
my culture, our first responsibility is always survival.
There is no other choice when faced with destruction, but
to turn and defend ourselves, our women and our children.
That is what I did when the agents invaded the private
property of the people I and others were there to protect.
Yet, I remain in prison awaiting another appeal, another
parole hearing. and so it goes.

The so-called patriots of today ignore constitutional
protections, the very ideas this country was founded upon.
Under the guise of threats to *national security,* the U.S.
government has rounded up *terrorists* and detained them,
never to try them or, if they do, to conduct sham trials.

This reminds me of the stories I heard as a child about the
hanging of 39 Dakota warriors on December 26, 1862, in
Mankato, Minnesota.  The hanging followed trials which
condemned over 300 combatants in the 1862 Dakota
Conflict, and stands as the largest mass execution in
American history.  The mere participation of the warriors in
a battle justified the death sentence.  So, where a prisoner
admitted firing shots, he was immediately pronounced
guilty without any consideration.  President Lincoln might
have signed the death warrants of all 300 defendants.  He
stopped at 38 after an aide told him that history would look
upon him unfavorably if he signed all of the death
warrants.  A youth the guards simply grabbed along the
way to the gallows became the 39th victim.  The mass
execution occurred in the opening years of the American-
Sioux treaty conflict that would not end until the Seventh
Calvary completed its massacre at Wounded Knee, South
Dakota, on December 29, 1890.

What I have learned in the past 28 years is that innocence is
the weakest defense where your government has decided to
target a person and/or squash dissent.  Innocence has a
single voice that can only say over and over again, *I didn't
do it.*  Guilt has a thousand voices, all of them lies.  And,
unless an innocent lies and admits guilt -- so the
government can claim victory -- the innocent remains
imprisoned.  Punishment for a crime a person did not
commit is the cruelest punishment of all.

In the end, maybe you think injustice can't happen to you,
only to someone else, the Other.  Maybe you can sweep the
streets of all undesirables, of everyone who is an Other.
But, one day, you may be declared the Other yourself.
What then?

Justice is not a flexible tool.  Unless we all do our part to
ensure that justice is applied equally to all human beings,
we are a party to its abuse.  We must stand together to
protect the rights of others.  No child should go hungry, no
woman denied protection from abuse, no person refused
health care or an education, no prisoner held for political
reasons.  But, as long as any constitutional rights are
allowed to become meaningless, YOU are at risk.  The sad
thing is that most people outside the prison walls don't
even know it.

Mitakuye Oyasin.

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse,


Leonard Peltier

Note:  According to a report issued by the U.S. Department
of Justice on July 25th, a record 6.9 million adults -- 1 in
32 (or 3.2 percent) of the adult U.S. population - were
incarcerated or on probation or parole last year, nearly
131,000 more than in 2002.

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