Its not every day that you ask the federal Office of the Pardon Attorney a routine question about the status of a prisoners petition for clemency and get a response from the FBI.

But thats what happened when HuffPost recently asked for an update on a petition for clemency for Leonard Peltier, the Native American rights activist who has been in prison for 46 years without any evidence that he committed a crime and after a trial riddled with misconduct .

HuffPost has been reporting on Peltiers imprisonment for months, and we emailed the Office of the Pardon Attorney late last month to see if a clemency petition filed in July by Peltiers attorney has moved along in the review process. The FBI unexpectedly wrote back. It sent over a statement saying it strongly opposes clemency for Peltier:

The FBI remains resolute against the commutation of Leonard Peltiers sentence for murdering FBI Special Agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams at South Dakotas Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1975. We must never forget or put aside that Peltier intentionally and mercilessly murdered these two young men and has never expressed remorse for his ruthless actions.

Peltiers conviction, rightly and fairly obtained, still stands, and has withstood numerous appeals to multiple courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. No amount of prison time changes the facts surrounding Coler and Williams deaths and commuting Peltiers sentence now would only serve to diminish the brutality of his crime and the suffering of their surviving families and the FBI family.

Getting past the strangeness of the FBI responding to an email not directed to the FBI, it was something to get a statement from the FBI at all. The agency has previously declined comment to HuffPost about Peltier.

It was, after all, the FBI that fought to put Peltier in prison in the first place after two of its agents were killed in a 1975 shootout on Pine Ridge Reservation . Its new statement affirms that it still wants the now-ailing 77-year-old to stay there, despite decades of outcry from international human rights leaders, including Pope Francis, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu and Coretta Scott King. Thats in addition to appeals by U.S. Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), members of the U.S. House, Native American leaders, celebrities and others.

Opposition from the FBI remains the biggest obstacle to freedom for Peltier, who is considered by many to be Americas longest-serving political prisoner . The problem with the bureaus argument for keeping Peltier in prison, though, is that it is full of holes.

Virtually every sentence of the FBIs statement is outdated, misleading or flat-out wrong.

Take the first line: The FBI remains resolute against the commutation of Leonard Peltiers sentence for murdering FBI Special Agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams at South Dakotas Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1975.

While its true that Peltier was convicted in 1977 of murdering two FBI agents, his legal team discovered in 1980, via a Freedom of Information Act request, that the FBI had intentionally withheld evidence showing that a ballistics expert had unequivocally ruled out Peltiers gun as the murder weapon. This revelation struck at the heart of the U.S. governments case.

After this bombshell, the U.S. attorneys office changed its story. It dropped its argument that Peltier had murdered the agents and said he aided and abetted whoever did do it. But the U.S. government now claims it doesnt know who killed those agents Peltiers two other co-defendants were acquitted based on self-defense and there was never evidence that Peltier aided and abetted anyone. He has consistently maintained that though he was present at the shootout with dozens of others, he didnt shoot anyone.

But the FBI was determined to put someone in prison after losing two agents . Peltier was the only guy left to pin the blame on. So he was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences despite there being no evidence he committed a crime.

The reason Peltier is still in prison after his conviction fell apart and the reason he didnt get a new trial is because the standard for reviewing whats called a Brady violation, or withholding evidence helpful to a person charged with a crime, was different in the 1970s than it is today. At the time, the standard was to gauge whether a jury would have come to a different conclusion based on the new evidence. When Peltiers attorneys appealed his case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit in the mid-1980s, the court ruled it was possible that a jury could have come to a different conclusion but could not say definitively yes.

Today, the standard for reviewing a Brady violation is gauging whether a defendant was deprived of a fair trial because new evidence was excluded.

Kevin Sharp, Peltiers pro bono attorney and a former federal judge appointed by President Barack Obama, said Peltiers conviction never would have stuck under todays system given that the new evidence in his case proved the murder weapon was not his.

Oh, my God. This was their whole case, Sharp said. This would absolutely fall apart.