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Higher Crime, Fewer Charges on Indian Land
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By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
Published: February 20, 2012
Indian reservations across the United States have grappled for years with chronic rates of crime higher than all but a handful of the nation’s most violent cities. But the Justice Department, which is responsible for prosecuting the most serious crimes on reservations, files charges in only about half of Indian Country murder investigations and turns down nearly two-thirds of sexual assault cases, according to new federal data.
The country’s 310 Indian reservations have violent crime rates that are more than two and a half times higher than the national average, according to data compiled by the Justice Department. American Indian women are 10 times as likely to be murdered than other Americans. They are raped or sexually assaulted at a rate four times the national average, with more than one in three having either been raped or experienced an attempted rape.
The low rate of prosecutions for these crimes by United States attorneys, who along with agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation generally have jurisdiction for the most serious crimes on reservations, has been a longstanding point of contention for tribes, who say it amounts to a second-class system of justice that encourages law breaking. Prosecutors, however, say they turn down most reservation cases because of a lack of admissible evidence.
Brendan Johnson, the United States attorney for South Dakota, said the government in recent years has deployed extra prosecutors and F.B.I. agents to Indian Country. And the Justice Department says it is seeking to make its decisions more transparent. Impatience on reservations is understandable, Mr. Johnson said.
“If I had the rates of crime in my community that they do, I’d be mad, too,” he said.
But tribes say they are rarely told why reservation cases are not pursued by the government.
“One of the basic problems is that not only are they declining to prosecute cases, but we are not getting the reason or notification for the declination,” said Jerry Gardner of the Tribal Law and Policy Institute in West Hollywood, Calif., which works with tribes to develop justice programs. “The federal system takes a long time to make a decision, and when it comes to something like a child sexual assault, the community gets the message that nothing is being done.”
Under federal law, tribal courts have the authority to prosecute tribal members for crimes committed on reservations, but cannot sentence those convicted to more than three years in prison. As a result, tribes usually seek federal prosecution for serious crimes.
Frustration has grown so acute that some tribal members have sued the government for declining prosecutions and for what they say is the related issue of sloppy police work.
Last month, a federal court in Montana allowed the family of Steven Bearcrane of the Crow Reservation to sue an F.B.I. agent who Mr. Bearcrane’s parents say conducted a flawed homicide investigation into their son’s death at 23. The lawsuit also said the United States attorney’s office has a practice of rejecting criminal cases in which the victims are Native Americans.
The Justice Department said it has made headway in resolving conflicts with tribes, pointing to a directive to United States attorneys to work more closely with tribal leaders and to the Tribal Law and Order Act, approved by Congress in 2010, which sought to strengthen tribal law enforcement systems.
But Tao Etpison, former chief judge of the Tonto Apaches in Arizona, said federal prosecutors typically live, work and try cases hundreds of miles from Indian Country. And at times, according to federal data, the Justice Department declines to prosecute violent reservation crime because local United States attorneys have said they lack sufficient resources. “These crimes are very serious for the reservation, but the prosecutors really don’t see it from a reservation perspective,” Mr. Etpison said.
Federal prosecutors in 2011 declined to file charges in 52 percent of cases involving the most serious crimes committed on Indian reservations, according to figures compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which uses the Freedom of Information Act to recover and examine federal data.
The government did not pursue rape charges on reservations 65 percent of the time last year and rejected 61 percent of cases involving charges of sexual abuse of children, the federal data showed. In contrast, the Justice Department declined 20 percent of drug trafficking cases nationwide, according to the federal figures.
Once federal prosecutors do decline a case, they seldom hand over evidence to tribal courts, according to the Government Accountability Office. An office report last year also found that federal prosecutors fail to tell tribes that they have declined cases until after the tribe’s statute of limitations has expired.
Federal prosecutors, however, say they seek to provide as much information as possible to tribes about cases they decline, though they are often limited because the cases may be reopened later.
Kerry J. Jacobson, an assistant United States attorney in Wyoming, said undertaking tribal prosecutions while the government decides whether it will file charges would create more problems than it would solve.
“We can’t turn over our evidence while we are doing our investigation,” she said. “And I don’t want victims of sexual assault to have to testify twice.”
Much of the time, however, victims do not testify at all.
On the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona, Mr. Etpison, the former tribal judge, said federal prosecutors had declined to pursue at least 40 sexual assault cases in recent years, most of them involving children.
Thomas W. Weissmuller, a former chief judge for several tribes, said he presided over a trial on the Swinomish Reservation in Washington State in which a 31-year-old man was accused of pouring root beer schnapps into the root beer of a girl who had recently turned 13. The girl, unaware of the alcohol, drank the soda and passed out. The man covered her face with her own clothes and raped her.
Mr. Weissmuller said that in spite of a DNA match and statements from two relatives who interrupted the attack, federal prosecutors did not file charges.
Though convicted of rape in tribal court, the man served only one year in jail — the maximum penalty in the tribal system at the time. The Justice Department declined to discuss the case.
“I don’t know why it wasn’t prosecuted federally,” Mr. Weissmuller said. “I believe it was a very clear-cut case.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/us/on ... d=fb-share
________
I'm glad someone is finally starting to pay attention to this problem! :(
Published: February 20, 2012
Indian reservations across the United States have grappled for years with chronic rates of crime higher than all but a handful of the nation’s most violent cities. But the Justice Department, which is responsible for prosecuting the most serious crimes on reservations, files charges in only about half of Indian Country murder investigations and turns down nearly two-thirds of sexual assault cases, according to new federal data.
The country’s 310 Indian reservations have violent crime rates that are more than two and a half times higher than the national average, according to data compiled by the Justice Department. American Indian women are 10 times as likely to be murdered than other Americans. They are raped or sexually assaulted at a rate four times the national average, with more than one in three having either been raped or experienced an attempted rape.
The low rate of prosecutions for these crimes by United States attorneys, who along with agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation generally have jurisdiction for the most serious crimes on reservations, has been a longstanding point of contention for tribes, who say it amounts to a second-class system of justice that encourages law breaking. Prosecutors, however, say they turn down most reservation cases because of a lack of admissible evidence.
Brendan Johnson, the United States attorney for South Dakota, said the government in recent years has deployed extra prosecutors and F.B.I. agents to Indian Country. And the Justice Department says it is seeking to make its decisions more transparent. Impatience on reservations is understandable, Mr. Johnson said.
“If I had the rates of crime in my community that they do, I’d be mad, too,” he said.
But tribes say they are rarely told why reservation cases are not pursued by the government.
“One of the basic problems is that not only are they declining to prosecute cases, but we are not getting the reason or notification for the declination,” said Jerry Gardner of the Tribal Law and Policy Institute in West Hollywood, Calif., which works with tribes to develop justice programs. “The federal system takes a long time to make a decision, and when it comes to something like a child sexual assault, the community gets the message that nothing is being done.”
Under federal law, tribal courts have the authority to prosecute tribal members for crimes committed on reservations, but cannot sentence those convicted to more than three years in prison. As a result, tribes usually seek federal prosecution for serious crimes.
Frustration has grown so acute that some tribal members have sued the government for declining prosecutions and for what they say is the related issue of sloppy police work.
Last month, a federal court in Montana allowed the family of Steven Bearcrane of the Crow Reservation to sue an F.B.I. agent who Mr. Bearcrane’s parents say conducted a flawed homicide investigation into their son’s death at 23. The lawsuit also said the United States attorney’s office has a practice of rejecting criminal cases in which the victims are Native Americans.
The Justice Department said it has made headway in resolving conflicts with tribes, pointing to a directive to United States attorneys to work more closely with tribal leaders and to the Tribal Law and Order Act, approved by Congress in 2010, which sought to strengthen tribal law enforcement systems.
But Tao Etpison, former chief judge of the Tonto Apaches in Arizona, said federal prosecutors typically live, work and try cases hundreds of miles from Indian Country. And at times, according to federal data, the Justice Department declines to prosecute violent reservation crime because local United States attorneys have said they lack sufficient resources. “These crimes are very serious for the reservation, but the prosecutors really don’t see it from a reservation perspective,” Mr. Etpison said.
Federal prosecutors in 2011 declined to file charges in 52 percent of cases involving the most serious crimes committed on Indian reservations, according to figures compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which uses the Freedom of Information Act to recover and examine federal data.
The government did not pursue rape charges on reservations 65 percent of the time last year and rejected 61 percent of cases involving charges of sexual abuse of children, the federal data showed. In contrast, the Justice Department declined 20 percent of drug trafficking cases nationwide, according to the federal figures.
Once federal prosecutors do decline a case, they seldom hand over evidence to tribal courts, according to the Government Accountability Office. An office report last year also found that federal prosecutors fail to tell tribes that they have declined cases until after the tribe’s statute of limitations has expired.
Federal prosecutors, however, say they seek to provide as much information as possible to tribes about cases they decline, though they are often limited because the cases may be reopened later.
Kerry J. Jacobson, an assistant United States attorney in Wyoming, said undertaking tribal prosecutions while the government decides whether it will file charges would create more problems than it would solve.
“We can’t turn over our evidence while we are doing our investigation,” she said. “And I don’t want victims of sexual assault to have to testify twice.”
Much of the time, however, victims do not testify at all.
On the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona, Mr. Etpison, the former tribal judge, said federal prosecutors had declined to pursue at least 40 sexual assault cases in recent years, most of them involving children.
Thomas W. Weissmuller, a former chief judge for several tribes, said he presided over a trial on the Swinomish Reservation in Washington State in which a 31-year-old man was accused of pouring root beer schnapps into the root beer of a girl who had recently turned 13. The girl, unaware of the alcohol, drank the soda and passed out. The man covered her face with her own clothes and raped her.
Mr. Weissmuller said that in spite of a DNA match and statements from two relatives who interrupted the attack, federal prosecutors did not file charges.
Though convicted of rape in tribal court, the man served only one year in jail — the maximum penalty in the tribal system at the time. The Justice Department declined to discuss the case.
“I don’t know why it wasn’t prosecuted federally,” Mr. Weissmuller said. “I believe it was a very clear-cut case.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/us/on ... d=fb-share
________
I'm glad someone is finally starting to pay attention to this problem! :(
Post edited by Unknown User on
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Comments
On why there's so much crime or on why the feds don't prosecute?
on the prosecution rates or lackthereof
It's one of those subjects that keeps getting shoved under the carpet. Various people have talked about it- Sherman Alexie, Vine Deloria Jr. and others. But the problems still exist and largely get ignored.
Thanks for posting this.
Honestly, I think this is a marginalized people and they just don't take priority for the federal government. To a certain extent, I don't think people really care if Native people are being raped and murdered. It's not that the actual investigators/prosecutors don't care (though I'm sure some of them don't), but they aren't provided with the resources to do their jobs well. Plus, I think there's this whole dichotomy of us vs. the dispensable "other" that's fueled by the historical and current context of Native peoples' distrust of the feds and able to continue in part because the individual prosecutors aren't part of the Native communities. But basically I think that people - some investigators, some prosecutors, those allocating resources, and much of the American public - just don't care. The reservations are just a far-away, abstract places that people don't have to ever think about.
What is the upside?
Thanks for caring.
I'll tell you why it's so important to me: I grew up on the Navajo reservation. (I didn't live there for most of my childhood, but I certainly grew up while I was there.) In one year, in a VERY small town, 20 (TWENTY) of my friends/classmates died - all from murder, suicide, and alcohol-related accidents. Ultimately, my ex-boyfriend/first love was brutally murdered, only able to be identified because my dad worked at the morgue and recognized some of his tattoos and had me identify the body. Everyone knew who did it. The people who did it put his disfigured body in the trunk and drove all over town showing off what they had done. One of the people involved actually lived across the street from his mother and younger siblings. I called the FBI investigator every week for months, until he stopped taking my calls. Every time I talked to him, the response I got was, "Yeah, yeah, we're working on it." Since my dad worked at the morgue, I had special knowledge of the circumstances and I would ask, "Did you check for this? Did you look into that?" - but the response was always the same. 15 years have now passed and no one has ever been charged. And there are countless other stories like this. Everyone knows that if you kill someone on the rez, chances are you'll get away with it.
The poverty rates are so high on the reservations that I don't actually think there are other communities with low enough incomes for comparison. I think that does have a lot to do with the crime itself, but since it's not the communities who pay for the investigations & prosecutions, income shouldn't have an effect on that.
I think you're right that there is less-than-ideal cooperation from the communities. To me, that goes back to the trust issue and the dichotomy is has born.
The upside is that their families live there. Their land is there. Their culture and traditions are there. Their language is spoken there.
brutal ... :(
I consider you the board's authority on Native Americans and my question is serious.
This is a terribly sad story. And sad because this kind of thing has been going on for so long. Unfortunately, too often many of us non-natives think that just by adopting some American Indian motif or putting our hair in a pony tail or buying some wayside trinket at a roadside shop- not that any of those things in-of-themselves are bad- but we suddenly think we get it and everything is fine. It's not. The treatment of American Indians since the time of continental conquest has been deplorable- and still is today.
I'm sorry also for your personal loss. Very sad and frustrating for you to get no good response to the situation.
I think many would say that two different cultures are being maintained: the Native culture and the American culture (or at least all the bad parts of the American culture, which isn't to say that the American culture in general is bad). One might even say it's the indigenous culture and the culture of the oppressors. The crime and poverty that occur among Native peoples are not part of their culture, but the result of their oppression by another culture. It stands to reason, then, that maintaining their own culture is the solution to the problem, not the cause of it.
Regardless, I think giving up their entire culture, way of life, tribal identity, would be like throwing the baby out with the bath water. They want to fix the problems of their communities, not get rid of the communities all together.
Third, I don't think it's practical. The reservations are the only places where tribes have been able to preserve their land. When I was in rural Kenya recently, the people were extremely impoverished, but they had land. The land gave them somewhere to sleep, the possibility of being able to grow food, and a place to be buried. When they give up their land, they have given up all possibility of self-reliance (as individuals and as tribes). Also, their elders live there and need to be cared for, so they can't just abandon them. And most people can't afford to just pick up and move their entire families to the city.
I think it's absolutely true that most Americans are simply ignorant of the situation on the reservations. Until I moved out there, I had no idea that people in the United States lived in such abject poverty, with no water, electricity, roads, etc. Granted, I was young at the time, but many of my conversations with people on this board have led me to believe that others don't understand either.
Thanks.
I agree about the corruption; it can be a big problem. But I think there's a cultural element and sovereignty issue that complicate matters much more that your average ghetto community. Also, even though they're sovereign, the federal government still controls a lot of what they do, like the law mentioned in the article that doesn't allow tribes to prosecute (or at least harshly sentence for) serious crimes.
PS Well you are right any higher crimes people will get shipped to outside authorities.