The years after Wounded Knee were Pine Ridge's "reign of terror": dozens of AIM members and traditionals killed while the tribal chairman's GOON squads operated with impunity. Into that war zone came the June 26, 1975 firefight at the Jumping Bull ranch in Oglala, in which FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams and AIM member Joe Stuntz were killed. The RESMURS investigation charged three AIM members: Bob Robideau and Dino Butler were acquitted at Cedar Rapids in 1976 by a jury that accepted they had acted amid an atmosphere of terror the government itself had fed.

Leonard Peltier, extradited from Canada on an affidavit its signer — Myrtle Poor Bear, who had never met him — later repudiated, was tried separately under different rulings and convicted in 1977 of two life terms. The case against him eroded for decades: ballistics reports withheld at trial, the prosecution's theory shifting on appeal to "aiding and abetting," and appellate judges who upheld the verdict while writing openly of their discomfort. Amnesty International, the UN, and the Pope's emissaries sought clemency through nearly fifty years of imprisonment, until President Biden commuted the sentence to home confinement in January 2025 — an end to America's longest-running political-prisoner case, without the exoneration his movement sought.