The 15-minute signing ceremony began with an introduction by Lisa Marie Iyotte of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, who through tears said that “had the Tribal Law and Order Act existed 16 years ago, my story would be very different.” In 1994, she was violently beaten and raped in front of her daughters by a local man. While tribal police knew the suspect, federal authorities never investigated, and the man went on to assault another woman. While the man was finally arrested and convicted after raping a teenage girl, Iyotte said, “He was never prosecuted for raping me.”

The Tribal Law and Order Act will improve evidence collection and training for officers dealing with cases like hers, and it will force federal authorities to share with tribes and Congress when it declines prosecution of cases on Native lands. And it gives tribal courts higher sentencing maximums for crimes committed by Indians on tribal lands.

“It is unconscionable that crime rates in Indian Country are more than twice the national average and up to 20 times the national average on some reservations,” Obama said.

The act passed the U.S. House last week after a 326-92 vote. It was supported by every member of Minnesota’s congressional delegation, except Rep. Michele Bachmann.

Sarah Deer

The Tribal Law and Order Act will be signed into law by President Obama Thursday afternoon at 4:45 pm Eastern, according to one Minnesotan who’ll be present for it. Sarah Deer, an assistant professor at William Mitchell College of Law, has been invited to attend. A member of the the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, Deer coauthored Amnesty International’s 2007 report “Maze of Injustice: The Failure to Protect Indigenous Women from Violence” (pdf).

“The federal government’s relationship with tribal governments, its obligations under treaty and law, and our values as a nation require that we do more to improve public safety in tribal communities,” Obama said in a statement after last Wednesday’s passage of the bill by the U.S. House. “And this Act will help us achieve that. It will strengthen the relationship between the federal government and tribal governments. It will improve our ability to work with tribal communities in the investigation and prosecution of crime, and it authorizes resources for tribes to fight crime more effectively.”

The Tribal Law and Order Act was passed as an amendment to HR 725 by a vote of 326-92. Minnesota’s entire congressional delegation voted for the measure, with one exception: Sixth Congressional District Republican Michele Bachmann. Bachmann’s office didn’t respond to the Minnesota Independent’s request for comment on her opposition.

The relative of a young woman raped on tribal land. Photo: Adam Nadel for Amnesty International

A bill aimed at helping Native American law enforcement investigate rape and other crimes by non-Indians on tribal lands passed in the U.S. House of Representatives last week with overwhelming bipartisan support. Only one Minnesotan — Republican Michele Bachmann — voted against it.

The Tribal Law and Order Act passed last Wednesday as an amendment to HR 725 on a 326-92 vote, with votes from Minnesota Republicans Erik Paulsen and John Kline and Democrats Keith Ellison, James Oberstar, Betty McCollum, Collin Peterson and Tim Walz. It gives tribal police more authority in seeking prosecution of non-Natives who commit crimes on American Indian lands. There are more than 63,000 Minnesotans who identify exclusively as Native American, according to the U.S. Census.

In 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that tribal governments have no criminal jurisdiction over non-Natives. So when a crime is committed, there’s something of a “jurisdictional vacuum,” says Sarah Deer, a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma and an assistant professor at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, with tribal police and state or federal authorities having to hash out who’s responsible and how to proceed with an investigation.

“What we find is that, by and large, in most communities, nobody really takes action,” Deer said. “There’s not actually a legal loophole, but it’s a practical loophole.”

“The jurisdiction is just a huge mess,” she added. “It’s very confusing to determine who has ultimate authority to take on a felony level sex crime in Indian Country.”

Kirsten Carlson, director of the Safe Women Strong Nations program at the Indian Law Center in Helena, Mont., says that jurisdictional issues often slow — or halt — investigations into the “epidemic of violence against women” on tribal lands.

“If you call law enforcement, they’ll ask, ‘What was the identity of the perpetrator? What’s your identity? What’s the status of the land? And what kind of crime is it? Oftentimes tribal law enforcement says, ‘We can’t respond. Our hands our tied because it’s a non-Indian perpetrator.’”

This jurisdictional mess — or “maze of injustice,” as the title of a 2007 Amnesty International report coauthored by Deer puts it — ends up disproportionately hurting women. According to government statistics, one in three Native women will be raped in her lifetime. That figure is 2.5 times higher than the rate for non-Native women in the United States, says Deer.

“I’d venture to say that’s a conservative estimate,” Deer told the Minnesota Independent. “When I travel to Indian Country and talk to women, they tell me, ‘Gosh, I  don’t know anyone in my community who hasn’t been raped.’”

The bill enhances communication between tribal and state or federal law enforcement and expands the ability of tribal police to investigate crimes on Indian lands. It authorizes the deputization of tribal law enforcement to investigate crimes by non-Indians on Native lands: As Deer puts it, “a tribal cop investigating a white rapist is essentially putting on a state or federal hat.”

In addition to expanding tribal police authority to investigate crimes by non-Indians, the act increases the maximum sentence that tribal courts could impose from one year to three years. That’s “three times what we had,” says Deer, but it’s still well below the 7- to 10-year sentences she says she typically sees handed down by federal courts for convicted rapists.

Still, the sentence maximums are shockingly low.

“Prior to the Tribal Law and Order Act, there was a one-year maximum sentence for any crime prosecuted in tribal court,” says Carlson, who is a descendant of the Cherokee Nation. “You could murder someone and have a maximum one-year sentence.”

Carlson notes another key advancement in the act.

“While it doesn’t restore criminal jurisdiction to the tribes, it does increase the accountability of the federal government to tribal communities,” Carlson said. “For the first time, federal officials have to report back on declinations of these cases to Congress and tribal communities. Federal prosecutors need to maintain records…. That is a tremendous movement forward.”

Where the act falls short in the eyes of many American Indians, as Carlson’s comments suggest, is in tribal jurisdiction over non-Native offenders who commit crimes on tribal lands. Such cases will still be heard in state or federal — instead of tribal — courts.

“I should just be satisfied with celebrating this victory, but I’d really like to see Congress take on this issue of non-Indian perpetrators,” said Deer. She’s perplexed by the rationale behind the 1978 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe.

“I think there’s a fear that tribal governments will be harsher on non-Indians,” Deer said. “I think that’s a racist idea at its core… the idea that tribal people can’t be fair. If you take racism out of the picture, then what the rule is doesn’t make sense.”

Carlson sees it as an issue of local accountability.

“What’s shocking about it is that under our constitutional system we think of crime as a local problem dealt with by local authority. This is a system where the local community doesn’t have control over it,” she said. “The reason that crime is a local issue in the United States is that then you can hold local people accountable.”

She notes that in Montana, there are 12 Assistant U.S. Attorneys (AUSAs) assigned to investigate rapes and violent crime on reservations, but they tend to live in bigger cities like Billings or Helena instead of on reservations. “It doesn’t impact them in the same way as it does in the local community.”

Still, Deer is “really, really pleased” that the Tribal Law and Order Act will soon be law.

“It doesn’t have everything that we would’ve wanted in an ideal world. You have to aim high and then accept the medium,” she said.

Bachmann’s communications director, Dave Dziock, didn’t return the Minnesota Independent’s request for comment on the Sixth District Republican’s no-vote.

Republicans elsewhere, however, have questioned the bill’s price tag, which some have estimated at $1.1 billion.

That’s a “myth,” Deer says. “There’s been some misunderstanding that it was going to be a high-dollar bill,” she told the Independent, noting that “there’s no mandatory spending” in the bill.

Deer wouldn’t speculate on why Bachmann opposes this important boost for Indian women, which President Obama is expected to sign into law soon, but she expressed some surprise.

“I’m not sure why she didn’t. It’s very much about prosecution. It’s a very law-and-order bill.”

Update: President Obama will sign the Tribal Law and Order Act into law Thursday afternoon.

On Thursday, July 29, Lucy Rain Simpson of the Indian Law Resource Center’s Safe Women, Strong Nations project will speak at Minneapolis’ Birchbark Books about violence against Native women.

Source: collettforcongress.com

Teresa Collett, the GOP-endorsed candidate to take on Rep. Betty McCollum in November, has been cited for drinking and driving twice in the past 4 years, the Star Tribune reports. Collett is a law professor at the University of St. Thomas and has testified at the Minnesota Capitol that if same-sex marriage is legalized, pastors and religious parents will be arrested for opposing those weddings. She’s also been part of legal actions in several states aimed at making abortion illegal.

According to the Star Tribune, she was arrested in May 2006 in Minnetonka after a motorist and an officer noticed her swerving into the oncoming lane.

Collett’s blood-alcohol content was 0.17 percent — more than twice the 0.08 percent legal limit — and the officer ended a field sobriety test prematurely because Collett repeatedly lost her balance, according to a police report.

“Ms. Collett told me that she was supposed to have a talk with her husband tonight about her drinking,” the officer wrote.

And just a few months earlier, she failed a breathalyzer but the officer let her go with a lesser charge.

In February 2006, Collett was cited for careless driving near Duluth. She drove her car into a snowbank while on a cell phone, according to police records. According to the police report, a state trooper determined her blood-alcohol level was 0.083 percent — slightly above the legal limit — but let her off with a careless driving citation. Collett said he told her to pull into a nearby gas station and wait 30 minutes before driving. She paid a small fine.

The article notes that Collett told GOP chair Tony Sutton about the citations after she was endorsed by the party.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar Photo: Nancy B. Olsen

Sen. Amy Klobuchar teamed up with Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas on Wednesday to introduce legislation that would make it illegal for prisoners to sell ‘murderabilia.” The Stop the Sale of Murderabilia to Protect the Dignity of Crime Victims Act of 2010 would ban “prisoners from mailing any object the prisoner intends to be sold in interstate commerce” and would allow victims of crime to recover damages from the sale of such items.

“As a former prosecutor, I know firsthand what it is like to work with families who have lost loved ones to violent crimes,” Klobuchar said in a statement. “Criminals that commit these violent crimes shouldn’t be able to further profit from their acts by selling items that wouldn’t have any value except for the notoriety of the seller. I’m glad to work with Senator Cornyn on this issue, and proud to continue fighting for crime victims”.

Cornyn added, “It is reprehensible that criminals who are supposed to be paying their debt to society are exploiting their notoriety and profiting from their deplorable crimes.”

James O'Keefe and the cover of a recent issue of his old college magazine. Sources: YouTube, The Centurion

WASHINGTON — When James O’Keefe applied for a grant to fund a conservative newspaper at Rutgers University, he appealed to people like Sarah Longwell. As the senior program officer at the Collegiate Network, she toured campuses across America to help conservative and libertarian students start newspapers or keep their publications running. She “read basically every conservative college paper” and got to know the sort of people attracted to the unpaid work of right-leaning campus muckraking.

“You always knew when you met a James O’Keefe,” Longwell says. “When I watch the television, and watch him say things like ‘the truth will set you free,’ I think: there’s a certain type of person who’s so obsessed with being in-your-face contrarian, and being famous for it, that he does it without thinking of the consequences. I certainly met people like him in other places.”

Few conservative activists went on to achieve the fame O’Keefe did for the 2009 sting he pulled with fellow activist Hannah Giles, posing as a pimp and prostitute inside ACORN offices, and secretly taping the advice they received. In the week since O’Keefe and three colleagues were arrested for apparently tampering with phones in the New Orleans office of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), national reporters have trained their eyes on organizations like the Collegiate Network and the Leadership Institute. The CN also gave a grant to the Patriot (George Washington University) and The Counterweight (University of Minnesota-Morris), where O’Keefe’s accomplices Stan Dai and Minnesota native Joseph Basel, respectively, had worked in college. The Leadership Institute employed O’Keefe for a year to train conservative activists; while there, he formed a friendship with Ben Wetmore, another veteran campus conservative who put up the four activists at his home before the Landrieu escapade. But any attempt to make them the faces of conservative college journalism, argued Longwell, would be off-base.

“From what he’s said and what he’s doing, O’Keefe strikes me as an ideologue,” said Longwell. “To use him to define conservative campus journalism is silly.”

Longwell has gained some perspective on this. In 2005, she left the Intercollegiate Studies Institute–the umbrella organization that runs CN–for Berman and Company, a free-market public relations firm in Washington that aggravates liberals with dogged, smart-alecky campaigns against their causes. Also joining Berman was Justin Wilson, once the editor of CN’s paper at the University of Michigan, then another program director at CN. Both later worked with Bret Jacobson, formerly the editor of the CN’s paper at the University of Oregon. (Before she came to CN, Longwell worked at a CN paper at Kenyon College.) In the years since, all three of them helped out with a punchy campaign against the Employee Free Choice Act–legislation that would make it easier for workers to form unions–at Berman’s Center on Union Facts. That campaign included ads that portrayed union organizers as thugs and undercover videos–conducted with more subtlety than O’Keefe, who would pose in costume–that captured union strategists shifting their strategy. One measure of how successful Berman and Company was at frustrating Democrats came when the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) angrily ripped up one of the firm’s anti-EFCA newspaper ads in front of a cheering crowd of union workers.

According to activists who spoke with the Washington Independent, the experience of campus conservatives who went on to Berman is more representative of the movement’s investment in college journalism than the trials of O’Keefe, Dai, Basel and Wetmore. It’s the sort of work that the three latter activists were doing until last week, using their training and connections to become players in the intelligence industry or in conservative activism. For the Leadership Institute, the Collegiate Network, and the National Journalism Center run by Young Americans for Freedom–just three of the conservative training organizations that have operated for more than a generation–the Landrieu debacle was a distraction from a project that had been going quite well. Conservative activists and journalists who’ve come out of those training programs have had a larger, but quieter, impact than O’Keefe. (Disclosure: I edited a CN paper, The Northwestern Chronicle, from 2002 to 2004, and I held a CN fellowship at USA Today from 2004 through 2005.) They’re well-funded–ISI, CN’s parent organization received, $8.3 million in contributions in 2009–and while they don’t release the names of donors, their trustees include American Spectator publisher Al Regnery (ISI), Heritage Foundation president Ed Fuelner (ISI), and GOP strategist Frank Donatelli (LI).

“Every two years or so, somebody writes a story about how conservatives on college campuses have suddenly discovered journalism,” said John J. Miller, an editor at National Review who came there from the same conservative UM paper as Berman’s Justin Wilson, and who hires summer interns from the CN roster. “Still, if you took people under the age of 40 or 45, right-of-center journalists — however you want to categorize them — a lot of them came from these conservative campus newspapers.”

While O’Keefe’s experience with the Leadership Institute has received more attention than his CN grant — and more than the internship Hannah Giles had at the National Journalism Center — the path from campus conservative journalism to D.C. influence is reliable. Before Marc Thiessen wrote speeches for George W. Bush, he was editor-in-chief of the Vassar Spectator. Before the Chamber of Commerce’s James Gelfand was tripped up for an email asking if it was possible to fund a study that would discredit health care reform, he was an editor at the Northwestern Chronicle. They place yearlong fellows at Roll Call, The Hill, The Weekly Standard, The American Spectator, and USA Today. Last year, the CN’s program expanded to the Raleigh News & Observer in North Carolina. John McCormack scored a Collegiate Network internship with Miller on the strength of his work with the GW Patriot–the same paper that produced Stan Dai. From there he got the CN fellowship at The Weekly Standard, and was hired full-time after his fellowship ended. In October 2009 and January 2010, he shifted the momentum of elections in New York’s 23rd congressional district and in Massachusetts by hounding candidates who were blowing off his questions, prompting them to overreact–and suffer from the ugly headlines that resulted.

This doesn’t take much money. The Leadership Institute’s contribution to college papers consists of Balance in Media Grants–once $500, recently raised to $750–to offset the cost of the first issue of a new publication. The Collegiate Network gives out annual grants up to several thousand dollars based on a number of factors, including frequency and quality of publications, and pays stipends for its media fellowships. Media organizations who hire CN fellows are pleased by the results, and not bothered by the O’Keefe story.

“We’ve been quite happy with our CN fellows over the years,” said John Siniff, executive forum editor at USA Today. “Does the O’Keefe story change the way I think about interns from the CN? No.”

In the months after O’Keefe’s ACORN story, he was embraced by the conservative journalism network. He gave a short, well-received speech to the annual Collegiate Network conference, held last year in San Antonio. The Leadership Institute trumpeted O’Keefe’s experience with the group. Since the Landrieu debacle, the praise has mellowed but not disappeared.

“There was a fairly universal celebration that he gave ACORN a black eye,” said Steven Sutton, who manages the college journalism program for LI. “I don’t think it marks a milestone or launch date — we’re not going to be having James O’Keefe Day dinners to mark the day that he busted ACORN.”

“This kind of ’stunt’ journalism requires skill, like an acrobat,” said Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative author whose work at the Dartmouth Review in the early 1980s set the tone for decades of conservative campus journalism. “It’s pretty easy to fall off the ropes if you’re stupid about it. The ACORN story ‘worked,’ because the masquerade proved a point about ACORN, but trying to tap a senator’s phones–well, there’s a point where you are breaking the law, and no one is above the law.”

Among conservatives, there’s a consensus that the work of campus journalists, and the connections that the network can give them, won’t be touched by O’Keefe’s scandal. Berman’s David Martosko–who attended Dartmouth with D’Souza, but did not work for the Review–told the Washignton Independent that campus conservative papers continue to produce smart “contrarians” with exactly the reporting skills and sense of humor that Berman needs.

“For every James O’Keefe,” said Sarah Longwell, “there are 50 serious journalists coming out of these programs.”

O'Keefe in his pimp costume, via Nola.com

In September, Rep. Michele Bachmann hailed as “brilliant” James O’Keefe, who with Hannah Giles orchestrated a sting operation at a Philadelphia ACORN office, posing as a pimp and a prostitute. Today, it appears that may have been an overestimation. Days after the duo was named in a federal lawsuit for the ACORN sting, O’Keefe was arrested by the FBI along with three others, allegedly for tampering with phones in the New Orleans office of Sen. Mary Landrieu.

Back in September, Bachmann praised O’Keefe and Giles at the How To Take Back America conference for their undercover expose of a Philadelphia ACORN office, in which they posed as a pimp and prostitute seeking advice from the anti-poverty group: “Hannah and James used Saul Alinsky’s ‘Rules for Radicals’ — that’s the community organizer’s bible — against ACORN! Brilliant!”

(In a House floor speech the same month, Bachmann alluded to O’Keefe and Giles’ sting, although in an odd way. She accused ACORN of “furthering the trafficking of illegal aliens, minor girls into childhood prostitution and child abuse,” when in fact O’Keefe and Giles — not ACORN — were the ones posing as attempted sex traffickers.)

But their brilliance came into question when an independent investigation, commissioned by ACORN and conducted by former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger into the Philadelphia sting found:

The videos that have been released appear to have been edited, in some cases substantially, including the insertion of a substitute voiceover for significant portions of Mr. O’Keefe’s and Ms. Giles’s comments, which makes it difficult to determine the questions to which ACORN employees are responding. A comparison of the publicly available transcripts to the released videos confirms that large portions of the original video have been omitted from the released versions.

Then on Thursday, Katherine Conway-Russell, director of the group’s Philadelphia office, filed a suit against the filmmakers, as well as the conservative website Breitbart.com, in federal court for recording and disseminating her words without permission, a violation of state law.

On Monday, O’Keefe and three others were arrested for posing as employees of a telephone company in order to gain entry to Landrieu’s office in the Hale Boggs Federal Office Building and manipulate telephones. According to a Times-Picayune, O’Keefe, Joseph Basel, Stan Dai and Robert Flanagan (son of the Acting United States Attorney for the Western District of Louisiana) were charged with entering federal property under false pretenses with the intent of committing a felony.

According to an FBI affadavit (pdf), both Flanagan and Basel “admitted to federal agents that they were not telephone repairmen and that they entered the office of Senator Landrieu under false pretenses.” The affadavit, written by FBI Special Agent Steven Rayes, states the belief that the pair had the intention of “willfully and maliciously interfering with a telephone system operated and controlled by the United States of America,” adding that they were “aided and abetted” by O’Keefe and Dai.

Elsewhere in Minnesota news this morning …  

MINNEAPOLIS: Tim Dolan scolded, officer arrested. The Civilian Police Review Authority Board says the police chief doesn’t discipline his officers; one just got arrested today in a string robberies. [Star Tribune; WCCO]

STATEWIDE: No rush to follow suit on unallotment challenge. School-district and local-government associations won’t be piling on Gov. Pawlenty in court anytime soon. [Politics in Minnesota]

BLOOMINGTON: Airport food workers vote today on raising wages. The new union contract would lift pay as much as 8 percent — a rarity these days. [Workday Minnesota]

ST. CLOUD: Rockefeller Center it ain’t. Putting an ad hoc skating rink where the old library was is just silly, and building a skatepark in natural Heritage Park is just wrong. [St. Cloud Times]

ST. CROIX RIVER: On the internet at last. A blogger posts a 20-minute video called “The St. Croix: A Northwoods Journey” that the National Park Service made but never put online. [Greg Seitz]

MINNEAPOLIS: The new American Dream. For some men, it’s not owning a home. [New York Times]

Photo: wdcpix.com

The ranks of GOP presidential rivals who poll higher than Gov. Tim Pawlenty may soon thin if doomsayers are correct about Mike Huckabee’s future. Pundits (and Republicans) say the former Arkansas governor is on the ropes for having granted clemency to the suspect (now dead) in Sunday’s Washington State cop-killing. Meanwhile, tea-leaf readers say a significant co-sponsorship of Pawlenty’s Dec. 16 speaking event in New Hampshire bodes well for his Granite State support.

By saying he wouldn’t have offered clemency in the Arkansas case (and never has, in Minnesota), Pawlenty didn’t spare Huckabee during an interview on Laura Ingraham’s radio program Monday.

On the show, T-Paw also shrugged off his sub-Huckabee showing in a Washington Post survey of support for likely GOP 2012 candidates. ”Nobody really knows who I am. That doesn’t surprise me or concern me,” said Pawlenty, making sure to plug his political action committee, Freedom First, by its internet address: timpawlenty.com.

Having scored political points back home by removing 52-inch flat-screen TVs from a state facility where sex offenders who have served their sentences remain confined, Pawlenty applied a TV analogy to the national health-care debate that again centered on screen size:

Laura, if I said to you or your listeners, please go home on your way home tonight from work, buy any television set that you want, any size, any features, any cost, don’t even look at the price, just send me and Mary Pawlenty the bill at the governor’s residence in Minnesota and we’ll pay for it, I mean, how many of your listeners would show up with a 12-inch black-and-white?

In New Hampshire, former U.S. Rep. Jeb Bradley has signed on (along with eight other Republicans in the state Senate) as a co-host for a $500-per-person event that Pawlenty is headlining to benefit the state’s Republican Senate Majority Committee.

Bradley told CQ Politics it’s not an endorsement, although “We’re thrilled he’s willing to give up his time to visit our state.”

RedHampshire.com casts a skeptical eye, asking, “Does this visit count towards the traditional ‘I need to meet him 3 times before I support him?‘”