Behind the celebrated leadership case ran the grinding machinery of the "non-leadership" prosecutions: hundreds of defendants — occupation participants, supply runners, and people arrested at roadblocks — cycled through federal courts in South Dakota, Nebraska, and Iowa for three years. The Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense Committee, staffed by volunteer lawyers and legal workers, matched the government motion for motion, and the results were unprecedented: of the roughly 185 indictments, barely fifteen produced convictions, a failure rate documenting how little criminal conduct underlay the mass charging.
The strategy's cost was the point. Defendants spent years traveling to hearings, posting bond, and living under indictment; AIM's organizing capacity was consumed by its own defense; and the movement's resources drained into courtrooms while the Wilson regime's violence on Pine Ridge went unprosecuted. The committee's veterans carried the model — political defense organized as a movement institution — into the Peltier, Skyhorse-Mohawk, and grand-jury-resistance fights that followed.