Peltier sues journalist for saying he had role in Aquash killing
http://www.startribune.com/stories/468/3865612.html
Published May 5, 2003
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. - Leonard Peltier has filed a libel lawsuit over accusations
that he was involved in the 1975 killing of fellow American Indian Movement
member Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash.
The case, filed in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis, names as a defendant
Paul DeMain, editor of News From Indian Country, a newspaper based in Wisconsin.
Aquash's frozen body was found in February 1976 on South Dakota's Pine Ridge
Indian Reservation. The 30-year-old woman had been shot in the head in
mid-December 1975 after being taken from Denver.
Arlo Looking Cloud and John Graham are charged with first-degree murder
committed in the perpetration of a kidnapping. Looking Cloud was arrested in
Denver and taken to Rapid City, where he pleaded not guilty. Federal
prosecutors hope to extradite Graham from his native Canada to South Dakota to
stand trial. He has not been found.
The lawsuit quotes from an editor's note published in March in which DeMain
said, "The primary motive for the murder of Annie Mae Pictou-Aquash by other
members of the American Indian Movement in mid-December 1975, allegedly was her
knowledge that Leonard Peltier had shot the two agents as he was convicted."
The lawsuit also challenges DeMain's statement that Peltier was actually
convicted. "The government has admitted that it cannot prove that Mr. Peltier
shot the two agents," it states.
Peltier, who is serving two back-to-back life sentences in Leavenworth, Kan.,
called the editor's note an "irresponsible statement" that's "false and
defamatory" and caused him "mental anguish and damage to his reputation."
According to the FBI, agents Ron Williams and Jack Coler were killed in June
1975 as they searched on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation for robbery
suspects. Both were shot in the head at point-blank range after they were
injured in a shootout. Their bodies were left on a dirt road.
During the next year, four men were arrested in connection with the shootings.
Charges against one were dropped, and two others were acquitted.
Peltier fled to Canada. After he was extradited to the United States, a Fargo,
N.D., jury convicted him in 1977 of two counts of first-degree murder despite
defense claims that evidence against him had been falsified.
Peltier appealed, claiming he never had the chance to argue that his sentences
should be based on the theory he, at most, aided others in the 1975 killings,
or that he acted in self-defense. Courts have rejected his appeals.
DeMain has written extensively about the Aquash and Peltier cases and last
month won a Payne Award for NO Ethics in Journalism from the University of
Oregon for the work. He said Monday he stands by the story and that his sources
- whom he refused to name- will back it up.
"All I can say is I stand by those individuals who have related the information
that I'm basing my comments on," he told The Associated Press.
"Fundamentally I believe this is a fishing expedition," DeMain said of the
lawsuit.
The mid-1970s deaths of Aquash and the two FBI agents happened when tensions
between AIM members and government-backed factions ended in numerous deaths on
the Pine Ridge reservation.
Some speculated that Aquash, a member of Mi'kmaq Tribe of Canada, was killed by
AIM members because she knew some of them were government spies, while others
said she was killed because she herself was an informant.
Just before leaving office in January 2001, President Clinton considered
granting Peltier clemency but decided against it.
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