Paul Skyhorse Durant and Richard Mohawk Billings, two AIM activists working at the movement's Los Angeles camp, were charged in 1974 with the torture-murder of a taxi driver, George Aird — a killing to which three other camp residents, who received immunity or light dispositions, were directly linked by the physical evidence. Prosecutors nonetheless built their case against the two most politically identified defendants, and the pair spent years in pretrial custody while the proceedings, moved to Los Angeles, became one of the longest criminal trials in California history.
The jury acquitted both men in May 1978, jurors saying afterward that the case should never have been brought. By then the prosecution had served a function no verdict could undo: AIM's California organization had been bankrupted and stigmatized — headlines about "AIM murders" ran for four years — and movement lawyers came to cite Skyhorse-Mohawk alongside the Wounded Knee dismissals as the era's clearest example of prosecution as counterinsurgency, where acquittal arrives only after the organization is destroyed.