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SPEAKER: I'm glad to be back here. I was here many years ago during the Wounded Knee trial in St. Paul, where I lived for about a year. And we wandered around to, I think, virtually every institution of higher learning in Minnesota plus other places as well.

And I can remember this room, though I can't remember the date or the time, but I think I came here with either Russell means or Dennis banks. And it's taken me some 16 years to get back here. But I'm very happy to be here. I think this is a lovely room and an intimate room and a nice room for any speaker to speak in.

And they asked me what I would speak about. I gave a sort of fanciful title that I would talk about, the decline of the American Constitution or the Bill of Rights. And I will. But I want to do it in such a way that it makes sense to you that there are concrete examples to it.

I've been studying the Bill of Rights for most of my life for the 50 years or so I've been practicing law here, there and everywhere else. I'm an itinerant lawyer. I have read, will travel. And I have traveled and I have many writs. And I have traveled and tried cases virtually everywhere, Both within the United States and in seven countries outside the United States.

I am approaching 71 and I've had 50 good years of lawyering. It's been somewhat controversial from time to time. I never thought when I was arguing for the Supreme Court last March about whether a kid from Texas could burn a flag at the Republican National convention that I would suddenly be back in the limelight again on the flag burning issue.

But putting that aside, I've been representing people a good portion of my adult life in many places. And I have given up the practice of commercial law many, many years ago. And it's been fruitful for me. I think it's kept me in relatively good health because you move around so much, there's no time to be sick.

And it's even enabled me to father two more daughters. I never saw the real connection between being a lawyer in the Civil Rights movement and producing more children. But apparently there is a connection, Because I have daughters who are 50 and 46 years of age, and I have daughters who are 13 and 11 years of age.

And I guess I had to rest up a long period of time from one to do the other. But I'm a father again and only daughters. I have no one to leave the farm to. But my daughters have given me much joy, and from time to time, much trouble.

One is a lawyer for the attorney general of the state of New York. One is a physician in Wichita, Kansas. And the other two are lilies of the valley. They neither spin nor they reap. They are consumers galore.

The Bill of Rights I've been talking about in many places. I just came from Seattle and from Spokane where I talked about the Bill of Rights. And I was surprised to open up the New York Times and find a full page ad from the Philip Morris company saying that it was concerned about the loss of the Bill of Rights in America.

So it isn't just the crazies or the lefties who are concerned. It's also major corporations as well, because the present majority on the United States Supreme Court, and I call them the gang of five, are deliberately and willfully, case by case, decision by decision, ripping the Bill of Rights apart.

Most of you don't know, and the historians will excuse me, that the so-called founding fathers and the one of founding mothers, you know, because to the founding fathers, women had no place whatsoever and aren't mentioned in the constitution in any way, shape, or form until we got to the amendment.

And even their name isn't mentioned, which gave the suffrage right, the voting right into the 20th century to women. But the founding fathers never wanted a Bill of Rights. They were dead against one, because the founding fathers were the aristocrats, the oligarchs. They were the rich, the bankers, the lawyers, the gents.

And there were no poor people at the Constitutional convention. No millwrights or shipwrights or laborers. They were just those who were going to take over from the British the economic system on these shores.

And so they didn't want a Bill of Rights. In fact, when it was raised at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, it was voted down 12 to 1. The only state that voted for a Bill of Rights was North Carolina. And the man that raised it was a man named George Mason, a little known patriot of the American experience. He was from Virginia.

He's buried on the Campus of Martha Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia. George Mason stood up and said, I want a Bill of Rights. And he offered the Declaration of Rights that he had written for Virginia virtually 15 or 16 years earlier, and he was rejected.

Washington terminated his friendship with Mason, although they had adjoining homes because he said my Erstwhile friend just wants to rile up the common people. Madison protested there should be no bill of rights.

And the Constitution went out, as you know, without a bill of rights. But it ran into trouble right away. Five states immediately ratified it. Minnesota was not one of the 13 states, as you know, or it would have insisted on a Bill of Rights, I'm sure.

But of the 13, five immediately ratified it without any hope or promise of a Bill of Rights. But Massachusetts demurred, and said that we are not going to sign this ratification, we're not going to ratify this instrument, unless we send back a Bill of Rights with it.

And so they put Mason's Bill of Rights, which was then 12 amendments. Two were chopped off later on. In fact, the freedom of speech amendment, the first was then the third. And they sent it back saying we ratify, but we want a Bill of Rights.

And every other state then followed suit, except North Carolina, which wouldn't even ratify, saying that it had to have the Bill of Rights first. And when it got back ratified finally, the first Congress was then meeting. We had an election. The president was elected, George Washington. First congress.

And they met in Federal Hall in New York, which had been New York City Hall when John Peter Zenger was tried and freedom of the press became an established fact long before the Constitution in 1734.

And in Federal Hall in an octagonal room on the first floor, and it's still there. If you go to New York, you ought to visit Federal Hall. In Federal Hall, Madison got up finally and said, we have all of these eight states or seven who have sent back the Constitution and they want a Bill of Rights.

And he said, we have to do something about that now. And he changed his position from anti-Bill of Rights to Bill of Rights. Not because he favored a bill of rights, but because there'd been a rebellion in Western Massachusetts.

A man named Daniel Shea had led the farmers in rebellion against the central government. There was a rebellion in Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania. There were stirrings everywhere that the common people who had won the revolution were not being adequately represented by the aristocrats, the gents.

And so a Bill of Rights was proposed on June 9th, 1789, when the first Congress met. And they didn't get around to voting on it until August when they finally voted. The Senate concurred, but took out a provision making it binding on the states something that eventually led to a Civil War and much trouble.

And then on September 25th, 1789, the Congress handed George Washington a Bill of Rights and said, send it out for ratification. And it was sent out. Washington did not favor a Bill of Rights.

In fact, although he was the president of the Constitutional convention, he never said a word at the convention that's been reported, except good morning, gentlemen. Let's get to work. And good evening, gentlemen, let's adjourn. Nothing else did he ever say.

But he took the Congressional Bill of Rights, as he had to, and it went out. And finally, on December 15th, 1791, Virginia ratified and became the ninth state to ratify and the Bill of Rights became part of the Constitution.

Since that time, we've had the damnedest struggle to make it meaningful on every level. As from just a few cases along the line, that it's run into serious trouble. For example, the Supreme Court held that it was all right to segregate Blacks out of society. And that separate but equal was fine under the Bill of Rights.

The Supreme Court held it was all right to relocate Japanese nationals or American nationals of Japanese ancestry after Pearl Harbor confiscate their goods and send them into concentration camps in the Mid America.

Just now we're now going to give $20,000 to each one so treated and wrongfully treated. We've had the Alien and Sedition Acts, which were enacted shortly after the Constitution, shortly after the Bill of Rights, which really made it a crime to criticize government. Punishable by many years in jail and a serious fine.

We've had all sorts of problems with the Bill of Rights. We've stopped people from speaking. We've violated the prohibition against mixing religion with the state. We violated every aspect of it. And it's taken long court fights to change that.

And now we have a Supreme Court with a majority of five who last term violated every one of the crucial amendments to the Constitution. For example, they sustained a proposition of Missouri that it could put all sorts of impediments in the way of abortion, particularly affecting poor women and young women, despite the fact that the Bill of Rights has inherent in it a right of privacy.

The same gang of five refused to hear an appeal by a Rhode Island woman who has been given a year in jail and fined $500 because she had a man stay overnight, a divorced woman with children living in separate bedrooms because she had a lover stay overnight and her husband moved to hold her in contempt because it was done in her own house.

There's your right of privacy, an integral part of the first amendment, among others. They've knocked out affirmative action. Richmond, Virginia had a plan, where 30% of all contracts for the city would be given to minority firms to try to bring them up to some level of equality. Supreme Court knocked that out. It said, essentially can no longer sue for discrimination in the workplace, violating the Civil Rights Act of 1866.

It held that it's all right for the police to mislead a defendant as to the availability of a free lawyer, an indigent defendant, when they were questioning him. And when he said, I'd like a lawyer, he was told you can't get a lawyer. And then he went ahead and made a statement used against him at the trial.

They said it was perfectly all right for the burden of proof to be totally shifted in discrimination cases so that the person bringing a discrimination case had to prove to the nth degree that the discrimination had occurred rather than the other way around by showing a prima facie case and then having the employer try to show that it wasn't done for any racial or gender discrimination.

These are just a few of last terms decision. It held it was all right for a helicopter to hover over a man's private home night and day, a police helicopter to surveil him night and day. And that this didn't violate the Fourth Amendment and its prohibitions against searches and seizures.

It is held it's all right to confiscate the assets of a defendant. So he can't pay for a lawyer. It is held that it is perfectly all right for a constable to break into your house without a warrant if he does so in good faith.

And we have the tragic case of a man who lived at 802 Evergreen Avenue. The policeman had a warrant for 804 Evergreen Avenue. He was nearsighted. He read 804 to be 802. Broke into 802, where our poor friend in 802 had four lines of cocaine and a broken straw on a table. He arrested him for possession of a contraband substance.

At the trial, the defendant said, you can't introduce this evidence under the exclusionary rule because you didn't have a warrant to break into my home. And the Supreme Court said, doesn't matter. He didn't have a warrant. It was illegal, but he was in good faith.

And they went on to say, even if the police lose evidence, that would have exonerated you. This is in the case of a bullet that might have proved the defendant did not fire the fatal gun. If it's lost in good faith, you have no cause to complain, even though the evidence would have exonerated you.

These are just some of the decisions that have taken place in the last term. Now, one of the prime amendments is the fifth amendment. And it's brought in against the states through the 14th Amendment, which was one of the great Civil War amendments.

And that Amendment says that you can't be prosecuted. You can't have your life or your liberty or your property taken away without due process of law. And yet, just a few miles from here, on April 18th, 1975 when I came through the Fargo airport heading for somewhere else and learn that Leonard Peltier had been convicted of the murder of two FBI agents.

A case was unraveled, which proved that Leonard Peltier was denied every aspect of the Fifth and 14th Amendment. I was not the lawyer for Leonard Peltier, except in his appellate struggles. But it is one of the most indecent cases that has ever occurred in American jurisprudence.

And I'm going to tell you why because I am burning with it and have been burning with it for many years. It proves that as far as Leonard Peltier is concerned, there is no Bill of Rights. And never has been for certain people.

And it creates an aroma abroad that is hard to dispel, if possible, to dispel. For those of you that don't know about the case. And I think it will illustrate why the Bill of Rights doesn't work for all of us.

On June 26th, 1975, on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation, a man named Dennis Banks, who was one of the defendants in the trial in St. Paul. And his wife Cammock went to court in Custer.

A man named Harry Jumping Ball and his wife, Cecilia, owned a plot of land on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. And on that plot of land, they gave a portion of it as a temporary home for Dennis Banks while he was being tried.

People were worried that Dennis would be murdered. He had just won his case in St. Paul, where after a nine-month trial, judge Fred Nichol dismissed the prosecution for governmental misconduct when he said the waters of justice have been polluted.

Dennis left at 9 o'clock to go to Custer with his wife, Cammock leaving behind some 15 or 16 people in what was known as Tent City. It's on top of a rolling hill where they had erected some tents and there were some wooden out structures where they were living during the trial period.

There were four or five adults there. All the rest were young boys. One was even an infant. There were a number of young girls who wee taking care of the camp. After Dennis had gone, the breakfast dishes were washed.

People did what they do to clean up. It was a warm day. Five days into summer. When two late model cars came rushing up the hill. They contained two FBI agents-- a Jack Kohler and a Ronald Williams.

Pine Ridge, by the way, had the greatest concentration of FBI agents of any place in the United States. There were more FBI agents put on that reservation than any other single locality, over 250 at the height to watch the American Indian Movement.

They came rushing up the hill, and no one really knows quite what happened after that, except there was a shootout. A great number of Bureau of Indian Affairs police came, a great number of FBI agents.

The shootout went on all day until night fell. Two agents were shot to death and one native American, Joe Stuntz, was shot to death. Somehow the Native Americans got away.

At the trial, one of them, Norman Brown said, we followed an eagle. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. I'd like to believe that they did. They hid under a culvert. When it was very dark and very late, they scattered. And they managed to get out of this encirclement of at least 250 to 300 law enforcement officers.

Later on, four people were indicted for the killings of the agents. There's a man named Rubidoux, a man named Butler, a man named Eagle, and Leonard Peltier. Jimmy Eagle was the youngest. He was 19. The others were late 20s, early 30s. They were the oldest that the Bureau could ascertain were there, except Jimmy Eagle was not there.

The reason that the courts were given that the agents had come there was because Jimmy Eagle had allegedly stolen a pair of boots. Why the FBI was interested and whether they even had jurisdiction as a question in someone stealing $40 worth of boots and had to send up not only the two agents, but surround the area by others is still a mystery to this day.

The shootout took place. The deaths occurred. The Indians escaped. And the four were indicted. The agents were killed by high powered, low caliber weapon. There were three such weapons on the intensity. They were known as AR15, a civilian equivalent of the M16 in the military. They are legal weapons. You can buy them at an arms store.

After the indictment, three were immediately captured. But Leonard Peltier had done what many Indians have done in the past, tried to get to Canada, such as Sitting Bull had done, such as Chief Seattle tried to do, such as others have tried to do over the years thinking things are better there and there is more protection.

The cases of Peltier, Rubidoux, and Butler were transferred because of alleged prejudice, anti-Indian prejudice in the Dakotas to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. And Rubidoux and Butler were tried there before a judge Edward McManus, the chief judge of Iowa. And they were acquitted. Then the charges were dropped against Jimmy Eagle who had never been there at all.

Meanwhile in Canada, Leonard Peltier had been arrested in Vancouver or outside of Vancouver. And the federal government here sent up two affidavits by a woman Myrtle Poor Bear. A woman with severe emotional problems and an alcohol problem, saying she saw Leonard Peltier shoot the agents.

The affidavits were false. The government was later false, forced to admit before the eighth Federal Circuit court that they were false and fabricated. And Canada, even now is attempting to get Leonard back to Canada because its government was defrauded by the United States. They will not succeed, but at least they're so outraged, they're going to try to do it.

The government then decided, once they got Leonard back, that they would investigate why the first two were acquitted in Cedar Rapids. And they came to the conclusion that they were acquitted because you couldn't put a gun in their hands that would fit a bullet in the agent's body.

And that they had to now, and I'll quote what they said, "We have to now put the full prosecutor to light of the federal government be directed against Leonard Peltier. And we have to connect him, we have to lock him in to the murders of the agents."

And he was ordered to trial in Fargo. No one knows how he got to Fargo. Judge McManus says he doesn't know how the case was transferred. It was done mysteriously and illegally. And he was brought back to the very place from which the cases had all been transferred because of prejudice.

And brought back before a judge, Paul Benson, a man who has been reversed for his anti-Indian statements in later cases and tried before him. A man who is a senior judge in Fargo. A man who should be sitting in the cell occupied by Leonard Peltier.

But in any event and who cooperated undercover with the FBI in the preparation of the case against Leonard Peltier. How lock Leonard Peltier? How violate his Fifth Amendment rights? How deny him due process?

And what they did, they brought forth a casing, a 223 casing. Now a 223 casing could be fired from an AR-15 It could have been the weapon and the bullet of the number of bullets that kill the agents.

They said they found a 223 casing in the trunk of agent Kohler's car. Agent Kohler had stopped his car and pulled out a rifle from the trunk and left the trunk up. And although two agents said they found the casing on two different days and two different places, they produce the casing a trial.

They said the casing had been tested by a man named Evan Hodge, a ballistics expert with the FBI, against an AR-15 which they claim was the only AR-15 on the reservation, even though we now know there were three.

And that this AR-15 had been seen in Leonard Peltier's hands. So how you can tell one AR-15 from another is difficult to say. And Hodge said I tested this casing against the mechanism in the AR-15, by the way, which had been found in Wichita, Kansas.

I tested it against the casing. And I found that it was ejected by the extractor which throws the bullet after the shot is fired. Throws the casing out of the weapon. And that it matches.

And on the strength of that casing, the jury convicted Leonard Peltier. It was the only evidence different than had been presented to the jury, which acquitted two of the defendants in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Leonard was given two consecutive life sentences by Judge Benson, which he is now serving at Leavenworth, the federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas. Some of you may have seen the CBS program West 57th Street, which showed the Buffalo grazing outside of that prison.

Leonard then applied for Freedom of Information Act. And he got 6,000 pages of the 16,000 that they had on him. And Lo and behold, one of them was an October 2nd, 1975 teletype from Evan Hodge, the ballistics expert, saying that there was a different firing pin in the Wichita AR-15, and it could not be the weapon that had fired that casing. Could not be the weapon.

We went back to Judge Benson and asked for a hearing and he denied it. The Eighth Circuit ordered a hearing. We had it in Bismarck. Judge Benson then predictably denied any relief. And then it went to the eighth circuit, which held it for a year.

And finally came to this conclusion. It said we are terribly uncomfortable with the decision we're making today. We know that Leonard Peltier might have been acquitted had the jury known that Evan Hodge was lying on the stand. But we cannot say he certainly would have been acquitted. That's how they got around the law.

And we are terribly uncomfortable with our decision. It is the hardest decision we have ever had to make. And those of you that saw Judge Heaney, who wrote this opinion on the West 57th Street program know that he said, I feel that the FBI was just as much at fault as Leonard Peltier in causing this shootout on June 26th, 1975.

And they affirmed the conviction, and the Supreme Court denied review. So Leonard has never had a review by the United States Supreme Court. Meanwhile around the world, unlike the United states, many countries have felt the wrongness of this conviction.

In fact, Spain gave him its civil rights award two years ago. The Soviet Union, maybe for its own purposes, has picked up the case with 19 million signatures with reference to Leonard Peltier urging the president to do something about this miscarriage.

I went to Siberia, eastern Siberia a year ago April, where there are people who identify closely with the American-Indian. It is their feeling that the migration over the Bering Strait went from west to east. Many Native Americans think it went from the opposite way, from east to west. But regardless of that, they are duplicates of people on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

Their customs are the same. Their physical characteristics are the same. They build their huts facing the east as the teepees face the east here. They do the same bead work. They have the same type of bows and arrows. They have a museum with the same kind of rock carvings and rock paintings, except for the speaking of their native tongue, which is not Russian, but Heixiazi.

They are an autonomous region of the Soviet Union having their own government. And I went there because they invited me there. And there isn't a child, a man, or a woman that doesn't know Leonard Peltier's name and doesn't have a feeling about him.

I took over a painting from Leonard that he had painted as an excellent painter, even though he's lost the sight of one eye in prison. And I presented it to Premier Gorbachev in the Kremlin, and it hangs in Gorbachev's office today.

Mr. Gorbachev autographed a book, copy of his book on Perestroika, which was taken over and given to Leonard. He sent over two physicians. When the prison refused to allow the leading American expert on retinal hemorrhages, which is what Leonard had into Leavenworth. And the two Soviet physicians finally got in after a nine-month fight. But it was too late to save the eye.

Meanwhile, he sits in a cell in Leavenworth. When he applied to the Supreme Court for review, some 15% of the House of Representatives of the United States signed on in support of a new trial led by Don Fraser, an ex FBI agent who thought there had been a terrible wrong done here. He got over 65 colleagues to sign a brief in support of Leonard Peltier.

Every religious order in the world filed a brief, 82 representatives of religious orders. The international head of the Jesuit order, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in the United states, Jesse Jackson, Bishop Tutu in South Africa, the Muslim order, Rabbi Balfour Brickner, the American Congregation of Rabbis, and so on. 82 signed a brief.

Two of the largest trial lawyers association filed a brief saying, this is a derogation of our Bill of Rights. And if you let this man rot in prison, you are causing a blow to all of us. None of it did any good.

Just days ago, Oliver Stone who made the movies Platoon, Wall Street, decided that he was going to do his next film to be called The Spirit of Crazy Horse about Leonard Peltier. And that film will go into production on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation I imagine in the next half year or so.

But meanwhile, Leonard rots in prison. He's been in prison steadily for some 16 years. He has been denied every right that a criminal defendant could have. The hiding of the crucial document that would have exonerated him, so that the jury never saw it.

The prevention by Judge Benson of Myrtle Poor Bear, the woman who signed the false affidavits, to be brought before the jury so they could see what lengths the FBI would go to in order to convict Leonard Peltier.

I understand the motive behind it. Four defendants, three are gone, two acquitted, one dismissed. And they must have somebody to avenge the two agents. And so Leonard Peltier, because he went to Canada and was not tried in Iowa, where he would have been acquitted, was brought to Fargo by means nobody knows.

No motion was made to bring him back here. The only motion made was to transfer him to Iowa. They wanted him tried in Fargo. They wanted them brought back to an area where he would have difficulty in getting an impartial jury.

They didn't want to trust Iowa anymore because an Iowa jury had acquitted two of his co-defendants. They wanted to destroy him if they could. And they succeeded. And that he is in jail tonight is an affront to all of us who say that the Bill of Rights has meaning to us.

Because under the Bill of Rights you're supposed to get due process of law. And as you know recently, a man in Florida, Mr. McLaughlin, who had been on death row for the killing of seven of his children was ordered release because key documents had been hidden that would have proved his innocence.

And Mr. Adams in Texas, you probably saw him on that television program, the Thin Blue Line, also on death row because key documents and key testimony were hidden away by the police. He was accused of killing, I believe a Houston police officer, was hidden away from him.

Fortunately, they were saved because lawyers came into the picture, obtained finally the documents that would have exonerated them, or at least convinced a jury they weren't guilty. And they were saved from death row, and eventually from prison itself.

The violation of the Bill of Rights is endemic. I just want to mention one more case to you, which is maybe the most shocking of all. And the most dramatic example of what happens when the Bill of Rights, this sacred charter of our liberty, second only to Magna Carta in importance, is flagrantly violated.

There was a young man named Roy Miller who was a drifter who lived on the flats outside of Peoria, Illinois. And he was accused of raping and murdering a 14-year-old girl from a Peoria High School.

The only evidence against him outside of the fact that he lived on the flats maybe 500 yards away from where her body was found, but there were many living on the flats, was a pair of undershorts which the prosecutor introduced into evidence.

And had a chemist testify undershorts found in his hovel. And the chemist testified that there was blood on the shorts and the blood was of a type not of Roy Miller, but of the young girl who had been murdered. It was her blood type.

Jury convicted, sentenced to death, and would have died in the electric chair at Joliet. But for the fact that two enterprising young ACLU attorneys decided long after the trial, long after his sentence had been affirmed, but days before his execution to get a court order to test those undershorts.

And to their surprise and shock, they found that they contained red paint and not blood. And that the prosecutor had dipped them in a can of red paint and had the chemist perjure himself that it was blood of a certain type, the type of the victim. It wasn't blood at all. And hours before his execution, he was saved.

The prosecutor had violated every Bill of Right that you can think of. Was guilty of attempted murder. But, of course, will never be prosecuted for attempted murder any more than the FBI agents who admit fabricating the affidavits in Leonard Peltier's case will ever be prosecuted.

Although we have a statute called obstruction of justice, it's one of the statutes Oliver North was tried on. But it will never be applied to these agents who are above the law and can do this kind of a thing.

If there had been a federal death penalty, Leonard would have been long dead by tonight. Fortunately, it was a lie because there is no federal death penalty in this area. And we are going to fight on.

Judge Heaney said in his opinion and on the program, West 57th Street, that the FBI was just as guilty as Leonard Peltier. And we're going to use that remark by the judge who wrote the opinion to try to get him again a new trial. Meanwhile, he is filing papers for parole. He is eligible for parole. The likelihood of getting it, I wouldn't bet my house on. But he is eligible for parole.

He isn't the first Indian, and maybe he's not the last who will be denied the protection of the law. We have a 14th Amendment won at the cost of a million lives during the Civil War that says no American shall be denied the equal protection of the law and due process of law.

But with Native Americans, as you know, we've never really applied anything to them. They're referred to in the Constitution as savages. And what we've done with them is, of course, the shame of our country. Penned them up on reservations. Given them clothes taken from smallpox victims.

Plied them with alcohol to a people who had no tolerance for alcohol. They weren't Western Europeans who had a great tolerance. We raided their camps, Sand Creek, Wounded Knee, and massacred them.

We violated their treaties. We're on the Missouri River here. And the Treaty of 1868, the Fort Laramie Treaty said that the Great Sioux reservation, which was half the state of South Dakota, was to endure so long as the grass shall grow and the river shall flow. And the ink wasn't dry on the treaty when we began to cut the reservation to ribbons.

It is now less than two counties in South Dakota. And the day before the shootout, United States took another portion of it because it contains uranium. So another piece was sliced away from that Great Sioux reservation, which is no longer the Great Sioux reservation.

It's been a genocidal approach fueled by racism, fueled by greed, land hunger, gold hunger. And Leonard Peltier is the descendant of all of this. And he sits half blind in his cell in Leavenworth.

He knows that he fired at the agents. Everybody fired at the agents and the agents fired at all the Indians. There was a shootout. No question about it. At the trial in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, scores of witnesses came forth to testify that on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation, where they have virtually 300 unsolved murders, many thing caused by an organization known as the goon squad.

Any stranger coming on the reservation, racing up a hill in new model cars, for example, said the head of the United States Civil Rights Commission for this area, who testified as a defense witness.

Any person living on the reservation when people came in unannounced. Would have done exactly the same thing. Even Clarence Kelly whom I subpoenaed, then chief of the FBI, had to agree that under these circumstances, everyone has a right to defend himself or herself.

And that's why they were acquitted. They admitted firing. There were many weapons fired. There were hundreds of bullets found all over the area. It was a shootout. It was a small war. It was probably the last of the Indian Wars on June 26th, 1975.

And yet one man supported by 3/4 of the world, sits in Leavenworth prison, destined to remain there, unless you take an interest and everyone else takes an interest because if it can happen to the least of us, it can happen to all of us.

And if we're going to parade ourselves in this changing world where we seem to be retrogressing while Eastern Europe and East Germany are now striding toward freedom, we seem to be the conservative nation, the pullback nation.

If we're going to let things like this occur in our midst and you are as close to it as any people being just across the river from where the indecency occurred, then we will have no one to answer to but ourselves when the long night comes. And it can come as it has come to other countries.

Leonard Peltier is a symbol for Indian people, but he should be a symbol for non-Indian people as well. You simply cannot take the Bill of Rights and flaunt it in order to get one man and destroy his right to a fair trial.

Just think, if you were accused of a murder, and were tried and convicted of that murder on the strength of a shell casing, which they said came from your gun and which was attributed to be a cause of death of the victim.

And you knew that kept from you was a ballistics report which said it couldn't come from your gun, couldn't come from your gun, because a firing pin is a conclusive test. No firing pin is like any other firing pin in any weapon under the sun.

And you were convicted and serving two life sentences when they hid that fact from you so that an FBI firearms expert could perjure himself on the stand and say it came from your gun. Think how you would feel doing that time, suffering under the sure knowledge that you had been falsely and unjustifiably and unconstitutionally convicted.

There is no doubt in my mind that if it hadn't been FBI agents, but a supermarket holdup with people killed, Leonard would be freed. There's no doubt in my mind that the eighth circuit, despite its feeling uncomfortable about the verdict, would not have hesitated to free someone where two people had died in a supermarket or a liquor store robbery.

But because of the pressures of the FBI and the fact that they were agents, they couldn't bring themselves to live up to their oath of office. That's why Judge Heaney said on national television, it was the hardest decision I ever made in my life. But what was so hard about it? It was only hard because of the identity of the victims involved.

I hope that someday Leonard walks free of that prison. The lawyers are trying to revitalize the Bill of Rights on his behalf. It is an uphill fight. There is no question about it.

We found out, by the way, from the Freedom of Information Act papers that the FBI had sat with Judge Benson before the trial, and worked on Judge Benson before the trial. In fact, one of the things they told him was that the Indians were going to bug his office, his chambers, but they would help him by bringing in sweeping devices that would set back the Indians bugging devices.

There were no bugging devices. I don't think with the Indians not afford bugging devices. They never had them. They were never there and they were never found. But he entertained these visits by the Bureau.

He stood in the corridor of the courthouse during the trial and made derogatory remarks about Native Americans that were overheard by people in the corridor. He was unfit to try the case. He is now a senior judge over in Fargo.

And I sometimes wonder, do they have any conscience at all? He should have given Leonard the new trial. It was all Leonard wanted was a new trial. Let a new jury now see the new report and see whether they would have convicted him or not.

Many years ago, I summed up in the Wounded Knee trial in St. Paul. It had been a nine-month trial. Every indecency that you can imagine occurred in that trial, which made the judge dismiss it after millions of dollars had been spent for FBI misconduct. Every indecency.

Just to tell you one will give you the tenor of that trial and indicate to the lengths that they will go to violate the Bill of Rights. The government decided that it had a witness by the name of Louis Moves Camp, an Indian, a young Indian who would come forward and testify that he had seen Dennis Banks and Russell Means fire shots, which paralyzed permanently a United States Marshal by severing his spine.

That was one of the charges against them. Carried life imprisonment. Louis Moves Camp testified to that. And then the judge discovered that at the very moment Lewis Moves Camp said he was watching them fire their rifles into Marshall's back, that he had been on a television program in Palo Alto, California on an aim, fundraising drive.

And that there were logs of his appearance there and tapes of his appearance at the very moment within five minutes of the time he said he was 1,000 miles to the east watching this happen.

And the judge said, you put a liar on the stand whom you knew was a liar. But the judge didn't know the half of it. Before Louis Moves Camp testified, he was kept in a motel in River Falls, Wisconsin.

And he was under the guard of two FBI agents-- Ronald Williams, who was later to be one of the agents shot at Pine Ridge, and David Price, who wrote the affidavits, the false affidavits for Myrtle Poor Bear a year later. While he was there, they let him out of the motel one night to go on the town. And he raped a young girl in a very bloody fashion. A student at the River Falls High School.

The FBI then went to River Falls and persuaded the parents of that young lady and the district attorney not to prosecute Louis Moves Camp, so that when he testified in St. Paul two days later, he would be clean. He would not have the stain of a rape indictment in River Falls that the defense could exploit.

When Judge Nichol heard all of this and other things-- I won't go into the illegal wiretaps and all the rest. While the jury was deliberating after a nine-month trial, he dismissed the case because he said the Bill of Rights has been violated. The waters of justice have been polluted. And so the trial wiped out.

Was anybody punished for this? No one. No one at all. Fortunately, for Russell Means and Dennis Banks, they were not prosecuted, even though virtually a year of their life was spent in a courtroom defending against these charges.

When I summed up in that case to the jury after nine months of testimony, I did not know quite what to say. I had a number of hours at my disposal. I went through the evidence, of course, as co-counsel had done before me. But I didn't know how to end the summation.

So the night before, when I was working on it, I went to see a woman, Meridel Le Sueur. Some of you may know Meridel, a very famous woman writer in the Midwest. And I asked her how I should end the summation.

How do you pull together nine months to a jury that sat there for that period of time? She said go to the St. Paul library and take out a book of collected verses and poems of Stephen Vincent Benet. And she said look at one poem called American Names. And read what it says about the writing of the poem, and then read the last stanza of the poem.

I went to the St. Paul library at 8 o'clock at night. This was in September of 1974. And I found the poem, and there was a statement above it that said that Stephen Vincent Benet had expatriated himself from the United States after a successful writing career here because he couldn't stand what had been done to Native Americans in his name.

And he had lived in France and he had lived in England. And that American names was a poem he had written to somehow express that feeling of why he had left his native land to wander abroad for so many years. He eventually came home and died. But much of his adult life was spent abroad.

And I read the last stanza. And it was just how I ended my summation. I saw what Mrs. Le Sueur had meant. And I'll end this with it as well, because I think it says in poetry and let your imagination run free, exactly what I wanted to say to that jury and to the larger jury in this room.

He wrote in the last stanza, "I shall not go back to Montparnasse. I shall not rest easy in Winchelsea. You can bury my body in Sussex grass. You can bury my tongue at Charmadi. I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass. Bury my heart at Wounded Knee." Thank you.

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