American Indian reservations are, to a certain extent, a world unto themselves. Tribal councils, rather than the U.S. government or state governments, generally control what happens on America’s 300-plus reservations on which many native Americans still live. But not when it comes to serious crimes, which are usually investigated by the FBI and prosecuted in America’s federal courts.
This often leads to a clash of very different cultures in which Native Americans are often treated poorly, sometimes leading to wrongful convictions. That may have been true in the case of four members of the Sioux tribe known as the Yankton Four. Jesse and Desmond Rouse and their cousins, Garfield Feather and Russell Hubbeling, were convicted of sexually abusing five nieces in 1994 after an abusive investigation and a trial during which the jurors told Indian jokes during deliberations.
The Yankton Four now have garnered support from as far away as Great Britain and Switzerland. More important, they are now being backed by the National Center for Reason and Justice. You can read more about this disturbing case here.
Wrongful Convictions Blog 
¬To all the People,
Please hear our story!
Four Native Americans were wrongfully convicted in 1994 sixteen years ago and have, ever since then, been imprisoned in various diverse federal prisons – being switched from prison to prison about every 2 to 3 years. Further, although the four men are related, two brothers and two cousins, they are not housed in the same federal prison.
After reading the transcript of their trial, I concluded that the defendants did not get due proc-ess and equal protection as constitutionally required in a court of law. These four men are in-nocent.
The men were convicted of sexual assault of their nieces. The only alleged evidence consisted of statements by the four children. The children had been taken out of their home, and manipu-lated, controlled, and brainwashed (a) by a social worker, Jean Brock, who had a motive of re-venge, (b) by a foster mother who was motivated by then-current and anticipated financial benefits, (c) by a therapist, whose techniques were dubious, and (d) by a guardian ad litem, who did not act in the best interests of the children.
The medical evidence introduced by the prosecution can be characterized as nothing but sus-pect – a smoke-screen. Doctors to whom the children were brought provided neither written reports to the defense counsel nor photographs requisite to the colposcopic examinations the children were made to endure. At 4, 5, and 6 years of age, the children were younger than the minimum of 13 years of age recommended in order for colposcopy to be performed.
Colposcopy is a technique using a camera and dyes on a vagina and anus to determine whether there is evidence of sexual assault or molestation. In this case, the medical professionals claimed that pictures were not taken. It is likely that any pictures taken showed nothing and were therefore withheld.
The political history of Native Americans and the American Indian Movement (AIM) played, and still does play, a significant role in this case. It is well-documented in the literature that the U.S. government broke each and every treaty with the Indians since the 1800s: from the Fort Laramie Treaty with its ‘Bad Men’ clause to well into the 1900s. Greed, inherent in Man, was the primary reason the treaties were broken. There were multi- millions of acres of Indian land to be sold to the whites, i.e., Euro-Americans.
As a result of the continuous treaty violations, the Native Americans became egregiously dis-advantaged and increasingly impoverished. It was cultural genocide planned, at one time or another, by every level of government from the President on down.
The government devastated the herds of buffalo and forced the Indians onto non-arable land. The government removed Native children from their families in order to destroy their familial and tribal identities. The government kept many children for years in either foster homes or boarding schools run by Catholic nuns and priests who zealously undertook to force — by pun-ishment and threat — the children to adopt catholicism. Home visits with parents were al-lowed maybe once or twice a year. The government ordered the clergy to cut the children’s hair, the length of which has cultural significance. The government ordered the Native chil-dren to be forced – again under threat of physical punishment — not to speak their tribal lan-guage. Any expression of Native religion was a target attracting extreme sanctions.
The object of these measures was to make the Indians into red Orio cookies, white on the in-side and red on the outside, and inhumanely result in the children losing their identity as Indian children.
Ever since the Westward Expansion and the Fort Laramie Treaty, the government has been try-ing to get rid of the Indians. In South Dakota, where racial discrimination against the Native Americans has been intense and endemic, the expression ‘Kill an Indian, Get a Man” is still heard.
In recent decades, particularly since the rise of the AIM in 1973, the federal government has concertedly been trying to imprison healthy and outspoken Indians: Get the politically active Indians out of the reservation, get them away from political activism and into jail, where they would be powerless to do anything, powerless to fight the ongoing corruption, powerless to ferret out the ongoing bribes, powerless to say anything about the ongoing racial discrimina-tion, powerless to speak out about the treaties being violated, powerless to interfere with any known corruption by government-appointed officials such as the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and powerless to challenge the sale of Indian reservation land rich in minerals, for example, ura-nium. Mass acres, massacres, mass arrests have been common. On the day one of the men in this case was arrested, the “government” simply walked into the tribal hall and arrested more than 22 men, all for different alleged crimes. Silencing red men was what it was all about.
In the ‘70s, specifically, a type of Hatfield-McCoy feud arose. The Rouse family was against the sale of reservation land to potential white settlors. The Cournoyers were paying off to buy votes to sell a considerable amount of acreage of the mineral-rich lands to whites, and then pocketing the money that was supposed to go to the tribe.
In the ‘80s, allied with the Cournoyers, the Archambeau family members both fire-bombed and shot into the Rouse home. One of the bullets just missed the head of Sonya, one of the Rouses’ sisters. No Archambeau was charged or prosecuted. No BIA or FBI agent investi-gated.
In the ‘90s, Defendant Desmond Rouse had been working at the casino. He and others became aware that money was being ripped of by the casino executives, including the Cournoyers, and the BIA. By June 1992, Desmond and others organized a sit-in at the tribal headquarters. Their goal was to change the administrative heads of the casino. The protesters wanted the casino money wasted by the administration to go to the children and elders to help with food, clothing and housing – that was the true motive for this protest action to speak out for the most vulnerable members of the tribe and bring about much needed change!
A significant by-product of arresting the four Native American men in this case and falsely charging them with crimes is the victimization of the children removed from the home and prepared for trial for 5-8 months later. Now adults, these children suffer not only from feelings of guilt for having testified negatively about their uncles but even more from feeling that no
matter what they say they are not believed by the court. For instance, at the outset, the children denied that “anything happened.” After months of threats and manipulation, they testified exactly as they were instructed to do. On appeal of their uncles’ convictions, the appellate panel, specifically outlining the “children’s story,” overturned the convictions and remanded for a new trial. The new trial never happened. By 2001, having grown older, the children, who had been recanting their false testimony since 1996, were finally testified again in court. Again the judge did not believe the children’s recantations. Depressed and angry and fearful of whites and the courts, some of the children have become alcoholics and drug users. One of these children in this case is so seriously depressed that he has become not only a self-mutilator but has also seriously attempted suicide by slicing his wrists.
Arising out of the political events are the motives for political retaliation. The men wanted to clean up corruption! No more bribes, no more selling the reservation to white settlers, no more stealing the people’s money, which they so desperately needed to fix up their houses on the reservation. The family feud has continued to present-day and the Cournoyers have continued to accumulate great wealth and the “benefits” of white society.
Given that the four Native defendants were unable to afford defense counsel or were essen-tially impoverished, the court-appointed defense counsel who would have to appear continually before the judge who appointed them. For the sake of their professional careers, the appointed counsel were syncophantic and held closely to their bosoms or chest hairs the code of silence of the legal and judicial communities. Thus the incentive for the defense counsel to remain in-effective.
Although the charges against the four defendants were not complicated, the legal issues cer-tainly were and required attorneys with experience and competence! One lawyer had never had a trial, one had maybe had one trial, another had maybe little more experience, and one, inter-estingly, was a retired judge. Those counsel did not conduct discovery; nor did they investi-gate motives; they did not call witnesses they should have called; they ignored information about which the defendants themselves told their respective counsel.
Some actions of the attorneys were overtly prejudicial to their clients. They missed statutory deadlines for the filing of certain pleadings. As a result, the judge denied them permission to produce alternative explanations of the alleged sexual abuse. One can conceive of one, per-haps even two, of the attorneys to miss deadlines, but all four attorneys to miss the deadlines! Unlikely. The attorneys refused to call witnesses whom the defendants believed would testify on their behalf! And when they did call certain people, the judge did not allow them to testify.
Further, to defend oneself, one must have the opportunity to cross-examine your accusers and to present your own witnesses. The defense counsel failed both to cross-examine the prosecu-tion witnesses and to present the defendants’ defense adequately. The only possible conclu-sion is that due process and equal protection and fundamental fairness were absent in the criminal case against the four indigenous Americans.
May your life be blessed with happiness, love and good health. We need help from good peo-ple to stand up for justice for us, our families, children and all the People.
Very truly yours
Jesse Rouse Desmond Rouse
Garfield Feather Russell Hubbeling
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Yankton Sioux seek justice for 17-year old case at the White House Tribal Nations Conference
In this letter I will tell you how this whole mad up case came about. I also told my lawyer all this before our trial even began! But he said that it had no bearing with the case? And now that I look back it had everything to do with our ‘railroad job’. This is the story of our demise?!
In the summer of 1992 our relatives and some of us took over our tribal headquarters be-cause we did not like the way our tribal president was running things?! You see our tribe had just built a casino on our reservation, “The Fort Randall Casino” and our tribal president was sipping off money, and he was not taking care of our elders and children! Instead he was stealing all the money from our casino!
Now when we took over our Tribal Headquarters we never used force nor did we use any weapons, we only had a peaceful sit in for ten days and we told the people that they could not come to work and that we were going to hold a General Election Meeting to vote in all new people and to end corruption. All new people starting from a new Tribal president on down to the Tribal council, secretary etc. Now during all of this we also ousted all of the people who worked at our Casino at the time. And now guess what!!? Jean Brock (Brock?) was one of these people who were arrested from the casino! So she was outraged to have lost this very cushy position, angry about what had happened to her job! So we started voting all new staff at the Federal Election Meeting that we had held and little did we know that somehow Jean Brock had applied for a job with our child social services department. And this position/ob now gave her the power to have her revenge.
A short while later one of our nieces allegedly Rose Mary complains to the school teacher that her grandmother is mean to her and does not feed her! If she even said this at all!? But on those words Jean Brock has her revenge: she is the fire starter, the one who starts all this sick crap, and the reminder of some well known racist people joined up with her in order to achieve a false conviction and hence to advance their career opportunities. One of the racist prosecutors is now a Federal Judge and she is still busy convicting natives. The judge in the case came across far from neutral, much more like a sick racist pervert dis-gustingly enjoying all this going on in his court room. The bias and racism was also flagged up by a jury member who felt indomitable about the comments made about Native Americans, but the judge just discredited her no problem.
My brother Jesse Rouse hardly even lived on the reservation and was not there when we ousted the tribal leaders, yet somehow he finally ended up top of the courts indictment list although he never featured on the first indictment list at all!?
My brother Jesse Rouse, Russell and Garfield were not around when all this happened, they might not even know about all this.