President Biden's recent commutation of Leonard Peltier's double life sentence for the killing of two FBI agents in 1975, sparked memories of Peltier coverage I did as a News-Leader reporter when he was being held at the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners here in 1984.

Peltier, a longtime American Indian Movement activist, had been convicted of the crime and imprisoned in 1977. He was fingered by the FBI as the killer in a shootout involving him and others against agents on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in Wounded Knee, South Dakota.

From the outset, Peltier and his supporters claimed he was not the killer, but had been framed through false prosecution evidence and testimony. By the spring of 1984, Peltier was in a federal prison in Marion, Illinois, where he and two other Indian activists had staged a hunger strike in April to protest the prison's alleged refusal to let them practice their religion.

Peltier and the other two were transferred to the Springfield prison in late May 1984. His presence was elevated when a Soviet Union journalist named Vladimir Simonov scooped the News-Leader, so to speak, by getting an interview with Peltier in early July. U.S. officials asserted the Russians were trying to create a narrative of American injustice and violation of human rights to counter the story of the Soviets' treatment of dissident Andrei Sakharov at the time.

Hungry for its own story, the News-Leader gained permission for a Peltier interview at the prison and I was assigned the task. I had already done the story about Simonov's meeting with Peltier.

My interview story ran on July 18, 1984. It noted that Peltier, 39 at the time, was happy with the renewed attention to his alleged innocence. He was articulate, affable and soft-spoken. He thought it ironic that it was the Soviet Union that put his case back in the spotlight.

He told me his lawyers were still working to get his case back in court and prove his innocence. The News-Leader at the time even editorialized that Peltier's case should be reopened. Now, 50 years after he was imprisoned and in failing health at the age of 80, he's secured release from the high security federal penitentiary in Colman, Florida. It remains to be seen whether his drive to seek innocence will continue.