First to go to trial were Dino Butler and Bob Robideau, in the federal district court of Judge Andrew Bogue. In April, WKLDOC argued that anti-Indian prejudice in Rapid City precluded any chance for an objective jury, and successfully applied for a change of venue out of South Dakota. The trial was rescheduled for Cedar Rapids, Iowa. On May 7, Butler and Robideau were moved to Cedar Rapids. Both later complained of death threats from their warders. Meanwhile their attorneys discovered that Cedar Rapids was 98% white and that the relatives of the late Jack Coler lived in the area. For its part, the government made the most of this promising situation. The FBI warned local law-enforcement personnel that carloads of AIM terrorists were descending on the town. On May 11, U.S. marshals visited every office in the Federal Building, telling folks to prepare for shooting incidents and seizure of hostages. They then advised them of precautions to be taken. The frightened citizens were assured that U.S. marshals on the roof would be on the lookout for marauding Indians.
On May 24, Rapid City police, reporting a huge cache of Indian armaments left over from Wounded Knee, tore up a vacant lot with backhoes, exposing three shotgun shells for their day's work. For the next month, as the trial got under way, Cedar Rapids was rife with rumors of renegade activity. On June 18, AIM's plans to "blow out the candles on America's birthday cake" in this Bicentennial Year were cited in an FBI publication called Domestic Terrorist Digest, which also warned of an Indian caravan to the Little Big Horn on June 26, the centennial of Custer's defeat. That year, Chief Frank Fools Crow actually did place a wreath on the ground in the first memorial ceremony ever help for the warriors who perished there one hundred years before. [Wow! What an urgent threat to civilization as we know it!] On June 21, a report allegedly emanating from Connecticut police intelligence warned that a terrorist affiliate of AIM, the Brown Berets (a Chicano activist group, already defunct) and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS; also defunct) had hatched a plan "to kill a cop a day," using "various ruses" to "lure law-enforcement officers into an ambush."
On June 22, the FBI released another four-page teletype under its own byline. It was distributed to law-enforcement agencies on the same date, oddly enough, as the "kill-a-cop-a-day" alarm, but held up another day before release. This report said that some two thousand AIM "Dog Soldiers" trained in "the Northwest Territory" by June Little, "who is expert with explosives," and using automatic weapons cached by Sam Moves Camp in Charlie Abourezk's house in Porcupine, were to proceed from the International Indian Treaty Council on the Yankton Sioux Reservation to the Rapid City house of AIM sympathizer Renee Howell (who wondered how she would fit them all in). From there, these two thousand dog Soldiers would fan out across the state to assassinate the Governor, blow up various state and federal dams, plants, and law-enforcement centers, take unspecified "action" at Mount Rushmore, "burn" farmers, snipe at tourists on the highways, and otherwise spoil all the fun of the Bicentennial celebrations. The Dog Soldier Teletypes were denounced by Senator Abourezk, who said that the mention of his son was part of an FBI "smear campaign" in retribution for the younger Abourezk's criticism of FBI and BIA actions and policies on the Lakota reservations: "It smacks of a total setup that these unfounded, unverified reports are given such widespread distribution." [Note: An "underground" member of the defense team, attorney Jack L. Schwartz, who analyzed the FBI mentality on the basis of the Bureau's own memos and documents, including those found on the agents bodies, established ample cause for the nervous "trigger-happy" attitude among their men. (Matthiessen, ibid, pp. 283-284.)]
On June 30, in Rapid City, Sheriff Larson announced that all local, state, and federal law-enforcement had been "beefed up" and all leaves canceled for the Bicentennial celebration. Asked if the alarmed patriots of the region could celebrate America's birthday without worrying about violence, the sheriff said "We have no concrete evidence to indicate otherwise." In truth, not a single sliver of hard evidence supported the lies and propaganda being aimed at the cedar Rapids jury by the U.S. Marshal Service, the U.S. Attorney's office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation of that sadly eroded institution, the U.S. Department of Justice. Nilak Butler remembers "I had to hitch rides for a couple of thousand miles up and down the country to get to Bob and Dino's trial. . . . I'd expected more organized Movement support toward their trial. It wasn't that anybody wasn't supportive, it was more that they had so many people going to court so many different places all at the same time. They had the Meanses going to trial in Dakota, they had Banks fighting it out in Oregon and California. I mean, they just had everybody going to court all over the country. Or in jail. Or dead. You know, they really smashed it up there for a while."
The trial opened on June 7, 1976, with Judge Edward McManus presiding and both defendants expecting conviction. "They were having a big old parade that day . . . . and the police were so paranoid they locked up the whole jail. The headlines at that time were that the Governor was asking for National Guard support during the trial. The feds had them psyched up so bad, and that's where we were going to get our jury. The citizens were more concerned that no damage would happen to their person, place, or thing, because they were just psyched out - totally psyched out. So we went out in the community and explained that there was a certain code of conduct that we still go by and abide by, and what they could expect during the trial." When the two thousand Dog Soldiers failed to show up, and the rest of the great scare campaign turned out to be lies as well as nonsense, the citizens of Grand Rapids began to observe the Justice Department stage directions with more skepticism, and perhaps some resentment as well. They also began to look at AIM with a fresh eye.
It was noticed by both press and public that the Indians attending the trial had established a camp outside of town where neither drugs nor alcohol was permitted. [See: I told you that once upon a time there really was such a thing as "independent media," which didn't just parrot the "official party line" in order to get better "access" in the future. Imagine that!] Judge McManus - called "Speedy Eddie" by the Indians after the conviction of Crow Dog, Camp, and Holder in his court in one week flat - allowed only a single day for the selection of the jury. For that he was sharply criticized by one of Butler's attorneys, William Kunstler, and by an attorney for Robideau, John Lowe. Aware of potential local prejudice against "radical sharpie lawyers from the East," Kunstler had dropped his flamboyant courtroom style and remained almost sedate throughout this trial. In this he was complimented by Lowe, a more conservative attorney from Charlottesville, Virginia. Lowe's copious knowledge of the details of the case was a great asset to the strong defense team. [Comment: I am not getting paid by the word. It's more accurate to say that I must pay for each word I use in this already too long document. I am not going to provide a long, detailed, and blow-by-blow account of this trial. Get the book and read it.]
Senior prosecutor Evan Hultman opened festivities by tripping over a wire during the interrogation of his first witness, knocking over a water pitcher as the jury laughed. An intelligent but inarticulate man, Hultman never quite managed to overcome this early impression of buffoonery because of his often garbled speech. One of the first things to come out in the trial was the testimony of Special Agent J. Gary Adams, who confirmed that he had seen the red pickup truck departing from the Jumping Bull area at 12:18 p.m., a few minutes after the agents must have died. Since it was apparent that none of the defendants had departed in that truck, that fact was an annoyance to the prosecution. (The truck was neither pursued nor investigated.) Early FBI reports that both agents had been "riddled by bullets" were explained away by a pathologist, Dr. Robert Bloemendaal of Rapid City, who said: "My initial impression, and this applied to both agents, I thought they were shot more times . . . . than when I got everything put together." Dr. Bloemendaal then presented several gory postmortem photographs to the jury. At least as damaging to the defense as the gory photographs was the testimony of two witnesses who had been members of the AIM group at Oglala. First to testify was Wilford (Wish) Draper, aged nineteen.
He testified that on the second night of the escape Peltier had said just what was needed to establish the premeditation required to convict these men of first-degree murder: "That night we were walking to Morris Wounded's house I heard Dino and Leonard and Bob talking about the agents. Leonard said something like 'I helped you move them around the back so you could shoot them.' Maybe he was talking about Butler and Bob. I don't know who he was talking about that night." While he was at it, he also implicated Jimmy Eagle's brother Leon as one of the horsemen who had given them directions during the escape. Under cross-examination "Wish" Draper acknowledged without hesitation that he had lied to the grand jury and also as a prosecution witness in this trial. He admitted that when he had been apprehended in Arizona in January he had been thrown against a car, then handcuffed and strapped in a chair for three hours while being threatened with a first-degree murder charge, until he finally agreed to provide useful testimony about the killings. He said that before the trial he had told defense attorneys that Peltier, Robideau, and Butler were all in camp when the shooting started, that he know little or nothing about guns, and that most of his damning testimony on this subject was based on on instruction from the FBI agents at the time of the grand jury hearing, and also by Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Sikma. Draper also said that the FBI had promised him exoneration on the ResMurs charges in return for his cooperation. Since he now claimed that he had been hiding in the woods during the shoot-out, the establishment of premeditation was the most useful contribution he could make.
Norman Brown was up next. However (at least to my understanding) Brown's testimony proved exculpatory for the defendants. The young Navajo, who was obviously proud he had sun-danced with his friends Leonard and Dino, related his impressions of the shoot-out, acknowledging that all the AIM men and boys except Wish Draper had been involved in shooting at the agents. Although admitting that he did not know where Peltier was when the shooting started, he placed none of the suspects closer to the agents than the line of of junked cars on the slope near the Y-crossing below the green shack, at least one hundred fifty yards away - almost as far away as the cabins from which the other Indians were firing - and in nothing he said did he implicate the defendants in the final execution of Coler and Williams. In fact, he denied what he had said to the grand jury - that he had seen the three down near the agents' cars and that later he had heard three shots. No, Brown said now, he did not even learn that the agents were dead until days afterward, when the group arrived in Porcupine. The boy's testimony also made it clear that although the AIM camp was aware that attack from goons or the FBI might come at any time, and had therefore posted guards, the people in the camp that morning were taken by surprise by the noise of the shooting; at no time, he said, had he ever heard any talk of "ambush." Nor had he heard the incriminating exchange between the three defendants on the second night of the escape as recounted by Draper, even though the fugitives, moving through the dark, had remained close together. Since Draper himself said he he had heard no talk of "ambush," the evidence of premeditation in the killings hung precariously on one vague and unsubstantiated scrap of conversation that he claimed to have overheard on the escape.