The natives are arrestless; the Justice Department has jurisdiction over Indian reservations, but is letting people get away with murder.

• Author: Hentoff, Nicholas

The Natives are Arrestless

On a cold January night in 1984, while Mrs. Aliene Lee and her daughter, Priscilla Lee Yazza, were watching television in Priscilla's trailer in Fort Defiance, on Arizona's Navajo Indian Reservation, the lights went out and the two women were confronted in the darkness by a man with a gun.

After a violent struggle, the gunman dragged Priscilla into her mother's car and drove off, leaving Mrs. Lee for dead on the floor of the trailer with two gunshot wounds to her head and Priscilla's baby crying on a couch nearby. The next morning, Priscilla's naked body was found in a nearby gully. She had been raped repeatedly and shot in the back of the head as she struggled up a roadside embankment.

Mrs. Lee survived the attack and still lives with her husband on the Navajo Reservation. She asserts that crucial evidence was destroyed by incompetent tribal police officers and that a lazy FBI agent, who made no effort to hide his prejudice against Indians, failed to follow up on important leads. Ultimately, the case lapsed into obscurity along with hundreds of other unsolved murders and rapes on the reservation.

Eddie Lee is convinced that if the crime had occurred in Phoenix or Albuquerque the murderer would have been caught within 24 hours. "Just because it's on the reservation it seems like it's all neglected," Mr. Lee said. "And it's been the same way for other people and other investigations. Just because we're Indians they're not getting in here and solving these crimes."

The government's own statistics support Mr. Lee's charges. On reservations in Arizona, Nevada, and Utah, Bureau of Indian Affairs officers investigated 2,456 felony cases in 1986 and the first half of 1987 but arrested only 181 suspects; that's a rate of 7.4 percent. By comparison, 23.6 percent of felony cases elsewhere in Arizona led to arrest. During this period, BIA officers presented 390 cases to the U.S. Attorney, of which 233 were rejected for prosecution. From 1984 through the middle of 1987, there were 974 serious crimes reported on six Montana reservations, but only 87 convictions.

In those rare instances when people who commit crimes on Indian reservations are prosecuted and convicted, the criminals tend to serve much shorter sentences than those convicted in Anglo communities. Although new federal sentencing guidelines may have some effect in the future, recent prosecution statistics from the U.S. Sentencing Commission show that murderers serve about a third as much time for crimes committed on Indian reservations as do those committing the same crime elsewhere. The disparity is even greater for bank robbery, auto theft, and transportation of stolen property.

Statistics compiled by the FBI suggest that this miserable enforcement record contributes to Indians being victims of violent crime almost twice as often as the general public.

The murder of Priscilla Yazza is a textbook example of what is wrong with law enforcement on Indian reservations. Investigators from several different agencies--federal and local--showed up. FBI and BIA agents were already in Fort Defiance, investigating a rash of violent assaults and rapes against the nurses at the local hospital, when the call came in about the shooting of Mrs. Lee and the abduction of her daugther. The FBI, BIA, and Navajo Tribal Police all converged on the crime scene. Col. Jonas Hubbard, the Director of the Navajo Department of Public Safety at the time, admits that there was a great deal of confusion. "Nobody took overall responsibility for the investigation," Colonel Hubbard said. "Everybody took it as 'my investigation.'" To compound the confusion, the investigators were indifferent, if not incompetent.

The Anglo file

Mr. Lee, after rushing to the hospital to see his wife, returned to the crime scene with some friends and relatives. They offered to help the police search for Priscilla but were told to go home. Mr. Lee later examined the embankment where Priscilla was shot and believes she escaped as many as five times before being killed. If only he and his friends had been allowed to help in the search that night, he says, the first place they would have looked would have been along the road where Priscilla was taken.

BIA investigators later claimed they combed the area completely, but were unable to track the killer from the place where he abandoned the car. Mr. Lee and his friends did their own investigation and found tracks leading to a nearby hogan. They also found a bloody towel and a piece of the pink shirt Priscilla was wearing that had been overlooked by the initial investigators.

The principal FBI agent assigned to the case was a six-foot-four-inch Anglo with blue eyes and red hair named Charles Moffett. Mr. Lee argues that it would have been better to have had Indian agents investigating the murder on the reservation since it...