Federal and state prosecution of AIM figures continued long after the siege years. Russell Means survived multiple trials and a state prison term in South Dakota; Dennis Banks, convicted for Custer, spent years in sanctuary in California and on the Onondaga Nation before serving his sentence in 1985. Later cases reached back decades: in 2004 and 2010, Arlo Looking Cloud and John Graham were convicted for the 1976 murder of Anna Mae Aquash, trials that reopened every wound of the infiltration era.
AIM's legacy in the political-prisoner tradition is double-edged: it produced some of the country's most celebrated defense campaigns — the Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense Committee became a model for movement lawyering — and, in Leonard Peltier, the longest-running clemency struggle in modern American history.