Justice, finally, for Wounded Knee Survivor and AIM Activist, Annie Mae Aquash.

[msanthrope]

SD jury convicts man in 1975 AIM activist's death
By NOMAAN MERCHANT, Associated Press

A dozen South Dakota jurors needed only about four hours to agree that John Graham and two other American Indian Movement supporters kidnapped a fellow activist in 1975 and killed her on the Pine Ridge reservation, one jury member said. But they weren't all convinced it was Graham who pulled the trigger.

After a second day of deliberations Friday, the 12 jurors convicted Graham of felony murder during the kidnapping of Annie Mae Aquash -- whose death came to symbolize AIM and its often violent struggles with federal agents during the 1970s -- but acquitted him of premeditated murder.

SNIP
Prosecutors said the activists who kidnapped and killed Aquash believed she was a government spy, which authorities have denied.

SNIP

Aquash, a member of the Mi'kmaq tribe of Nova Scotia, was 30 when she died. Her death came about two years after she participated in AIM's 71-day occupation of the South Dakota reservation town of Wounded Knee.

http://www.salon.com/wires/us/2010/12/11/D9K1JQA00_us_reservation_slaying/


Why was she killed? According to testimony given at the trial, she was killed because it was feared that she would testify against Leonard Peltier.


"Earlier Dec. 6, another witness testified that she and Aquash heard another AIM activist, Leonard Peltier, admit to killing two FBI agents in June 1975. Peltier was convicted in 1977 of shooting the agents and is serving a life sentence.

Darlene “Kamook” Ecoffey told jurors that Peltier talked about the incident in the fall of 1975, a few months before Aquash disappeared.

“He held his hand like this,” Ecoffey said, making a gesture resembling a gun with her hand. “And he said, 'That (expletive) was begging for his life, but I shot him anyway.”'

Prosecutors believe Graham, Looking Cloud and Clark killed Aquash because AIM leaders thought she was a government informant.

http://www.nativetimes.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4716:ex-suspect-testifies-in-aim-activist-slaying-trial&catid=55&Itemid=31


An excellent book on this murder, and on the FBI's mishandling of this case is "The Unquiet Grave" by Steve Hendricks.
http://www.amazon.com/Unquiet-Grave-Struggle-Indian-Country/dp/1568583648/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

[Hannah Bell]

1. or maybe she was killed because she was going to challenge the testimony of the real government spy.

the "other witness" Darlene “Kamook” Ecoffey, the one married to a US Marshall.

Kamook admitted under cross examination that she had been paid $42,000 by the FBI, for "moving expenses".

The other big surprise came when Darlene Nichols “Kamook” Banks and Robert “Bob” Ecoffey, the U.S. marshal who recruited Kamook for the FBI, married a few months after the Looking Cloud trial, in Rapid City, South Dakota, in September 2004.

(SEE Kamook’s testimony: http://www.jfamr.org/doc/kmtest1.html)

[xchrom]

2. +1

[azurnoir]

3. +2 it should also be noted that when her body was found

it 'supposedly somehow' got past the first medical examiner that she had a bullet wound in her skull and she had to be exhumed and a second autopsy preformed to prove she had been shot this happened about 6 weeks after Pelteir's arrest

In order to believe this one must also believe that leonard Pelteir is guilty, I for one do not for a minute

www.leonardpeltier.net/theman.htm

oh and getting a verdict in South Dakota against a Native American shooting fish in a barrel

[msanthrope]

5. Actually, the initial exam did reveal a bullet hole. And her family insisted it was murder, from

the start. (In fact, the bullet had lodged under the skin of the face, in a noticeable lump.)

"A few less tractable observers, all from beyond Dakota, nosed further. Freelancer Kevin McKiernan, whose reporting on Pine Ridge remains a gift to history, found a nurse by the name of Inez Hodges who had been on duty the night Aquash was brought to the hospital. Hodges had seen the Jane Doe in the morgue and instantly noticed an odd and obvious mark on the woman’s eye socket: the lodged bullet, although she did not diagnose it as such. She also saw a swath of blood on the white plastic sheet beneath the woman’s head. Its plain source was a raised crater at the base of the skull. Hodges showed her findings to a co-worker, whose name the FBI knows but to this day will not release. (To do so, says the FBI, would violate the witness’s privacy.)

Kevin McKiernan also found Dr. Stephen Shanker, who had pronounced Aquash dead on arrival. Shanker was just out of medical school, and his experience in matters postmortem was elementary. Nonetheless, in the first moments of his exam, he noticed that the hair on the back of Aquash’s head was matted with blood. He put his hand there and got a palmful of it, apparently freshly thawed. A moment’s probing brought him to the bullet hole. His analysis was unequivocal—“she hadn’t died of natural causes; it looked like a police matter”—and he assumed the autopsy the next day would analyze the wound more extensively. Both Shanker and Hodges said they were stunned by the exposure ruling and that after the bullet was finally found they expected authorities to interview them about what they had seen. The authorities did not—at least not until a public outcry was raised months later."

http://www.counterpunch.org/hendricks04232010.html

That the FBI screwed the pooch on the initial investigation of this case is undeniable. That she was still murdered by fellow AIM activists was admitted to by one of the killers. (Arlo Looking Cloud. FYI, his lawyer, Barry Bachrach, was Peltier's lawyer, too.)

[azurnoir]

7. Arlo Looking Cloud is a homeleless alcoholic oh and aquash was exhumed

On the afternoon of February 24, 1976 Rodger Amiotte, a mixed blood rancher whose land was in the northeast corner of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation...found the body of a woman in a snow-covered ditch one hundred feet from the country road. She was wrapped in a blanket. The woman wore a maroon windbreaker, jeans, and blue canvas shoes. She had long fingernails. Her hands were adorned with fancy turquoise jewelry, including rings and a large bracelet.
"The body was taken to the Pine Ridge hospital, where Dr. W.O. Brown performed an autopsy in the presence of FBI agents. The doctor said the unidentified woman died of exposure. She had frozen to death. There was no sign of violence.
"During the autopsy, an FBI agent asked Doctor Brown, "I need her hands. Sever them at the wrist, would ya, Doc?"
"Over the next days, the government agents approached mortuary after mortuary, asking to have the handless body buried. According to one undertaker, the FBI agents wanted the woman buried under a fictitious name. 'Can't do it,' he said. 'You guys ought to know. That's illegal.'
"...on March 3, the body was buried, nameless in the Holy Rosary Mission on the reservation. That same day, the FBI notified its Rapid City office that the dead woman was Anna Mae Aquash."
The Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense Committee (WKLDOC) demanded a an exhumation and a second autopsy. However, before this could take place, "The FBI filed its own request for exhumation and reautopsy. The reasons its affidavit gave were that Anna Mae might have been killed in a hit-an-run accident or that she might have been murdered by AIM as a suspected informer...there was no explanation as to how a person who might have been a victim of a hit-and-run accident could have been thrown one hundred feet from the highway, display no sign of contact with a vehicle, and end up in a ditch, neatly wrapped in a blanket." The autopsy was scheduled for March 11, 1976.
"Anna Mae's family, through WKLDOC attorney Ellison, hired Garry Peterson, an independent pathologist from St. Paul Hospital in Minnesota to observe. When he arrived, Dr. Peterson was the only Doctor there. The FBI had not bothered to have a pathologist at the autopsy it had requested. Peterson, who brought only the minimal equipment needed to observe, had to perform the procedure. It was not terribly complicated. An obvious bullet wound, surrounded by an even more obvious 5 cm x 5 cm discoloration, adorned the rear of Anna Mae's head, exactly where the hospital staff had seen the thawing body leak the week before. She died of exposure to a small-caliber bullet fired from a gun placed near the back of her head. She had been executed."

http://siouxme.com/lodge/anna.html

[msanthrope]

8. Arlo Cloud is not homeless. He is in prison for his role in the Aquash murder.

Now Graham can join him.

Now, the fuck-ups of the FBI in this case are monumental, but her murders are in jail.

[msanthrope]

4. Is the defense that they murdered the wrong person? That's still murder.

Arlo Looking Cloud has admitted his role in the murder he was convicted for.

42k in expenses is fairly reasonable when you've had to move, twice, because of threats. In the federal system, witnesses, CI's, victims, and even jurors are all eligible for monies having to do with trial and prosecution. If the feds paid her to move, it's not unheard of. Look at any RICO trial, and you'll see payments made to people to protect their security.

The Looking Cloud jury and the Graham jury heard all that, and still believed her anyway.

The Graham jury also heard testimony from Arlo Looking Cloud that he and Graham did participate in the killing.

Graham's defense didn't call a SINGLE witness to dispute the prosecution's case.

[azurnoir]

6. delete n/t