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Guilty Until Proven Innocent By Louise Erdrich

1257 Words6 Pages

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

Today’s justice system claims that, you are innocent until proven guilty, yet they confine the so called guilty person until they can prove their innocents. On Native American reservation tribal courts don't have jurisdiction to prosecute non-tribal personnel for crimes committed like sexual assault and rape that occurs on the reservations. The tribal criminal justice systems have limited resources, little to no back from the local law enforcement and almost no funding from the federal government to help improve on these problems. Louise Erdrich shows this through Bazil, a tribal judge and how the legal system fails his family. As a tribal judge Bazil is still unable to get justice for his wife, due to gaps in …show more content…

She then begins to identify her attacker to Joe and his father. Geraldine was attacked by a non-Native by the name of Linden Lark, who lured Geraldine to the round house, because he was fully aware of the tribal law that stated that non-tribal personal can’t be prosecuted on tribal reservations. Linden then attacked her on tribal land knowing that the tribe law couldn’t prosecute him. Based on Geraldine’s testimony in court Linden was arrested, but shortly after he was freed from jail due to the tangled laws that hinder prosecution of Native rape …show more content…

If State and federal laws won’t protect Native reservations form non-tribal personnel committing crimes on tribal land, then Native reservations should be able to have sovereignty over their own jurisdiction. Asserting jurisdiction over non-Natives gives back a sense of sovereignty and the importance of authority over outsiders that current laws sweep under the rug. Claudia Card writes, “ [i]t breaks the spirit, humiliates, tame, produces a docile, deferential, obedient soul. Rape impacts individual women physically, emotionally, and spiritually, and creates numerous problems in the lives of the victims.” A traumatic event such as this needs justice to be served for these Native women to be able to move on with there lives knowing that they got justice for the wrong doing that was done upon them. In the past Native Americans would kill anyone who sexually assaulted their women to show a swift response to their victims and the importance of strong leaders that set out to protect their communities. In today’s society sovereignty needs to be given back to Native Americans to once again be able to protect their people from the failing legal system so they can prosecute non-tribal personnel on their

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