ABSTRACT
A political trial falls between politics and law. In politics, justice and the legal bounds of the rule of law are embarrassments to the realist. In law, the legalist cannot acknowledge public influence and the political consequences of judgments by courts. The realist would Americans have believe that, as the world goes, all trials are political, just as the legalist would have it that, properly, none are political. When legal and political agendas clash in a political trial, the legalist and the realist will see this conflict as a failure of the rules to clarify what conduct is required or as a refusal by certain people to obey. The political agenda contains the stories which strike home with each of American as citizens. The issue of who speaks for the American Indians, or even the Lakota, remains, as does the larger issue of the place of the American Indian in American society.
