Prison Writings by Leonard Peltier

Author:Leonard Peltier
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250119285
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

part vi

a life in hell

The farce of unbridled lies and flagrant coercion of witnesses played out there in a courtroom.… This was the American judicial system at its very worst …

chapter 28

There were four indictments of Indians issued in late 1975 for the deaths of the two agents. I was one of the four. Only three of us ever went to trial. Charges were eventually dropped due to “insufficient evidence” against the fourth, Jimmy Eagle—whose alleged theft of a pair of cowboy boots had provided the FBI with its fabricated excuse for invading the Jumping Bull property in the first place. Strange, the murders of scores of traditionals on the reservation in previous months they all but totally overlooked, but the alleged theft of a pair of cowboy boots (later dismissed in court) became the immediate subject of a massive FBI investigation.

My AIM brothers, Dino Butler and Bob Robideau, were eventually captured, falsely charged with the murder of the two agents, and then put on trial in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in July 1976. By then I was under arrest in Canada, fighting extradition back to the U.S. At the Cedar Rapids trial of Butler and Robideau, the jury—appalled at the overwhelming evidence of government complicity in the ongoing terrorism at Pine Ridge as well as at the flagrant FBI misconduct at every stage—found Butler and Robideau not guilty. They ruled that, in firing at the unknown and unannounced invaders at the Jumping Bulls’ property that day, Butler and Robideau had acted in self-defense, which, indeed, they had—as had I and many, many others that day.

After the acquittal of Butler and Robideau, I became the last defendant they had left to pin with the phony rap. Charges against Jimmy Eagle were dropped so that, according to FBI documents later revealed, “the full prosecutive weight of the federal government could be directed against Leonard Peltier.” The government needed a scapegoat, a conviction to assuage its severely damaged public image. Someone had to pay for the deaths of the two agents, even if the feds didn’t know who had done it—as the prosecutors themselves later confessed. They wanted Indian blood, and I became the scapegoat, the one they’d been setting up all along. I suppose they figured that, if I got off like Butler and Robideau, it would somehow be open season on FBI agents. That may be understandable but it’s also absurd, of course—pure fantasy on their part. There was never any open season on FBI agents by Indian people, nor was there ever any plan or even suggestion for one. Maybe some of those FBI agents actually believed the disinformation their own agency was shamelessly handing out for public consumption. But, one thing was for sure, there had been an open season for several years on the traditional Indian people of Pine Ridge and on their AIM supporters. Examine the death toll over those years on Pine Ridge if you doubt it. FBI deaths by violence: two, agents Coler and Williams.

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