As Obama Moves To Free Manning & Rivera, Others Still Hope For Clemency
January 18, 2017
President Obama commuted the sentences of Chelsea Manning and Oscar López Rivera on Tuesday as other political prisoners — many held for decades on charges related to black and Native American movements — make their final pushes for clemency under Obama.
NEW YORK — As supporters celebrated the White House’s announcement on Tuesday that President Barack Obama had commuted the sentence of Puerto Rican icon Oscar López Rivera, convicted of seditious conspiracy in 1981 for his role in the pro-independence Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional, others sentenced on political charges decades ago are still hoping for clemency in the last hours of the Obama administration.
Among the cases Obama has yet to decide are appeals from Veronza Bowers, Jr. of the Black Panther Party, Leonard Peltier of the American Indian Movement, and Dr. Mutulu Shakur of the Republic of New Afrika — all imprisoned before the president enrolled at Harvard Law School in 1988.
“Leonard Peltier and Verona Bowers have been in federal prison since the 1970s, and Mutulu Shakur and Oscar Lopez since the 80s,” Laura Whitehorn told MintPress News.
Whitehorn, a former member of the Weather Underground Organization, served over 14 years in federal prison for a series of bombings against the U.S. Senate and military installations, as well as Israeli, South African, and police facilities, between 1983 and 1985.
The actions came in response to U.S. military interventions and domestic racism, and in solidarity with the Palestinian national movement and South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle.
Today, Whitehorn works with Release Aging People in Prison, a campaign to free elderly and infirm inmates, among the fastest-growing segments of the U.S. prison population.
“It is a simple matter of human rights to grant them clemency, as what is left of the federal parole system is held hostage by law enforcement and right-wing politicians,” she said.
