Weeks before Wounded Knee, in February 1973, AIM members and Oglala families confronted authorities at the Custer County courthouse in South Dakota after prosecutors charged the white killer of Wesley Bad Heart Bull, a young Lakota man stabbed to death outside a bar, with only second-degree manslaughter. Police in riot gear met the delegation on the courthouse steps; in the melee that followed, the courthouse annex and chamber-of-commerce building burned, and dozens were arrested — including Wesley's mother, Sarah Bad Heart Bull, who had come seeking justice for her son.
The dispositions became the movement's shorthand for South Dakota justice: Sarah Bad Heart Bull was convicted of riot-related charges and served months in prison, while her son's killer served no prison time at all, acquitted after arguing self-defense. The Custer prosecutions, running alongside the Wounded Knee cases, helped convince a generation of Lakota people that the courts themselves were instruments of the occupation AIM had risen against.