For seventy-one days in the spring of 1973, AIM and Oglala Lakota traditionals held the hamlet of Wounded Knee on Pine Ridge — site of the 1890 massacre — against federal marshals, the FBI, and armored personnel carriers, demanding hearings on the Fort Laramie Treaty and an end to the Wilson tribal government's violence. Two defenders, Frank Clearwater and Buddy Lamont, were killed by government fire before the stand-down on May 8. The occupation produced one of the largest federal prosecutions in American history: over 500 arrests and some 185 indictments.
The government tried AIM leaders Dennis Banks and Russell Means first, in St. Paul, on charges carrying decades. After eight and a half months, Judge Fred Nichol dismissed the entire case for governmental misconduct — an altered witness statement, concealed wiretaps and informants (including one inside the defense committee), and an FBI he found had "stooped to a new low." The dismissal of the leadership case, and the collapse of most that followed, established the Wounded Knee prosecutions as an exercise in what the defense called "lawfare": punishment by process rather than verdict.