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In the stacks of thick folders that cover Jonnie Bray's desk, there are tales of monsters.
The one in her hand starts on a winter night in 2003, when Ronnie Tom tries to rape the 12-year-old sister of his live-in girlfriend on the Colville Indian Reservation in eastern Washington. When she manages to escape, he moves on to his girlfriend's 7-year-old daughter who is nearby, and here he succeeds.
Bray, a Colville Indian and one of the tribe's prosecutors, said an expert forensics interviewer found the 7-year-old's testimony recounting the rape clear and credible. And a sexual-predator profile of Tom warned that he should never be allowed to be alone with children, including his own, or live "near places designed for
children, such as schools, playgrounds (or) swimming pools."
But Tom was never charged with a felony crime. That's because here, as on the majority of the country's nearly 300 Indian reservations, the sole authority to prosecute felony crime lies with the federal government. One hundred fifty miles away in Spokane, an assistant U.S. attorney - faced with a distant case and a 7-year-old witness - simply declined to prosecute, something that crime data show they do in 65 percent of all reservation cases.
Now Ronnie Tom is out of jail, freed after serving less than two years on the equivalent of misdemeanor charges Bray cobbled together in tribal court, including a separate incident involving the 12-year-old discovered later. Bray said he is again living with his girlfriend and their new child - a girl.
"He is a danger to our community and to any community," Bray said. "I was just disgusted. I don't think I've ever spoken to that U.S. attorney again."
Already some of the most violent and impoverished places in America, facing a steep rise in meth-fueled crime, the country's Indian reservations are also plagued by a systematic breakdown in the delivery of justice, a six-month investigation by The Denver Post found.
U.S. attorneys and FBI investigators face huge challenges fighting crime on reservations: They are viewed as outsiders who shouldn't be trusted; locations are remote; the high levels of alcohol use among victims, suspects and witnesses that accompany many serious crimes can also make them very difficult to prove, several U.S. attorneys said.
"We have the obligation before proceeding to a grand jury to make sure we have a prosecutable case," said James A. McDevitt, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Washington, who said he could speak only generally and couldn't comment on why his assistants rejected the Tom case. "We're not in the business of taking cases we're going to lose."
But the system is also badly dysfunctional, insiders say, burdened by competing federal priorities such as immigration and terrorism and undermined by institutional resistance to using the high-powered federal judicial machine to prosecute run-of-the-mill violent crime.
"I've had (assistant U.S. attorneys) look right at me and say, 'I did not sign up for this,"' said Margaret Chiara, who until March was the U.S. attorney for western Michigan, with jurisdiction over several reservations. "They want to do big drug cases, white-collar crime and conspiracy.
"And I'll tell you, the vast majority of the judges feel the same way. They will look at these Indian Country cases and say, 'What is this doing here? I could
have stayed in state court if I wanted this stuff,"' she said.
"It's a terrible indifference, which is dangerous because lives are involved." In the stacks of thick folders that cover Jonnie Bray's desk, there are tales of monsters.
The one in her hand starts on a winter night in 2003, when Ronnie Tom tries to rape the 12-year-old sister of his live-in girlfriend on the Colville Indian Reservation in eastern Washington. When she manages to escape, he moves on to his girlfriend's 7-year-old daughter who is nearby, and here he succeeds.
Bray, a Colville Indian and one of the tribe's prosecutors, said an expert forensics interviewer found the 7-year-old's testimony recounting the rape clear and credible.
And a sexual-predator profile of Tom warned that he should never be allowed to be alone with children, including his own, or live "near places designed for children, such as schools, playgrounds (or) swimming pools."
But Tom was never charged with a felony crime. That's because here, as on the majority of the country's nearly 300 Indian reservations, the sole authority to prosecute felony crime lies with the federal government. One hundred fifty miles away in Spokane, an assistant U.S. attorney - faced with a distant case and a 7-year-old witness - simply declined to prosecute, something that crime data show they do in 65 percent of all reservation cases.
Now Ronnie Tom is out of jail, freed after serving less than two years on the equivalent of misdemeanor charges Bray cobbled together in tribal court, including a separate incident involving the 12-year-old discovered later. Bray said he is again living with his girlfriend and their new child - a girl.
"He is a danger to our community and to any community," Bray said. "I was just disgusted. I don't think I've ever spoken to that U.S. attorney again."
Already some of the most violent and impoverished places in America, facing a steep rise in meth-fueled crime, the country's Indian reservations are also plagued by a systematic breakdown in the delivery of justice, a six-month investigation by The Denver Post found.
U.S. attorneys and FBI investigators face huge challenges fighting crime on reservations: They are viewed as outsiders who shouldn't be trusted; locations are remote; the high levels of alcohol use among victims, suspects and witnesses that accompany many serious crimes can also make them very difficult to prove, several U.S. attorneys said.
"We have the obligation before proceeding to a grand jury to make sure we have a prosecutable case," said James A. McDevitt, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Washington, who said he could speak only generally and couldn't comment on why his assistants rejected the Tom case. "We're not in the business of taking cases we're going to lose."
But the system is also badly dysfunctional, insiders say, burdened by competing federal priorities such as immigration and terrorism and undermined by institutional resistance to using the high-powered federal judicial machine to prosecute run-of-the-mill violent crime.
"I've had (assistant U.S. attorneys) look right at me and say, 'I did not sign up for this,"' said Margaret Chiara, who until March was the U.S. attorney for western Michigan, with jurisdiction over several reservations. "They want to do big drug cases, white-collar crime and conspiracy.
"And I'll tell you, the vast majority of the judges feel the same way. They will look at these Indian Country cases and say, 'What is this doing here? I could
have stayed in state court if I wanted this stuff,"' she said.
"It's a terrible indifference, which is dangerous because lives are involved."
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