Promises, justice broken
Source: Denver Post ()
Senior Prosecutor Vernon Roanhorse looks through files at his office in Tohajilee, New Mexico on the Navajo reservation. (Post / RJ Sangosti)Related ArticlesNov 13:Principles, politics collideNov 12:Justice: Inaction's fatal priceNov 11:1885 law at root of jurisdictional jumbleIn the stacks of thick folders that cover Jonnie Bray’s desk, there are tales of monsters.
The one in her hand starts on a winter night in 2003, when Ronnie Tom tries to rape the 12-year-old sister of his live-in girlfriend on the Colville Indian Reservation in eastern Washington. When she manages to escape, he moves on to his girlfriend’s 7-year-old daughter who is nearby, and here he succeeds.
Bray, a Colville Indian and one of the tribe’s prosecutors, said an expert forensics interviewer found the 7-year-old’s testimony recounting the rape clear and credible. And a sexual-predator profile of Tom warned that he should never be allowed to be alone with children, including his own, or live “near places designed for
Indian Justice
Watch video and see photos that detail the justice crisis that plagues Native American reservations in the United States.
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children, such as schools, playgrounds (or) swimming pools.”
But Tom was never charged with a felony crime. That’s because here, as on the majority of the country’s nearly 300 Indian reservations, the sole authority to prosecute felony crime lies with the federal government. One hundred fifty miles away in Spokane, an assistant U.S. attorney - faced with a distant case and a 7-year-old witness - simply declined to prosecute, something that crime data show they do in 65 percent of all reservation cases.
Now Ronnie Tom is out of jail, freed after serving less than two years on the of misdemeanor charges Bray cobbled together in tribal court, including a separate incident involving the 12-year-old …