Bad blood

The murder defendant sits at a glass-topped table, clutching two golden eagle feathers, flanked by his attorneys.

To his left, at another wooden table, sit District Attorney Noel Waters and his assistant. Farther to the left, the seven-woman, seven-man jury and alternates sit on blue-padded, wheeled, wooden chairs. Before him, the witness, a forensic specialist, enumerates blood spatters, drips and swipes. The court reporter sits to the witness’s left, and next to her is the judge, robed in black, peering over half-lens reading glasses. To the judge’s left are a court clerk, the bailiff and a sheriff’s deputy. The American and Nevada flags flank the Great Seal of the State of Nevada on the wall before him. It’s Sept. 11.

The defendant is Rocky Boice Jr. He is the first of nine defendants to be tried for the murder of Sammy Resendiz. Boice is Native American.

The murder happened in the Roundhouse Inn Motel in August 1998. The crime began when a Native American girl, Jessica Evans, went to her cousin claiming that a Latino gang member, Israel “Muppet” Ralla, had punched her at a party. Boice and 11 others went to the motel room armed with clubs, baseball bats, metal bars and chains for a confrontation with Ralla and the gang, Carson City’s Eastwood Tokers.

Ralla was not in the motel room, but Sammy Resendiz, Carolee Simpson and Carlos Lainez were. In the space of less than a minute, the Native American group—ranging in age from 14 to 24—exacted their punishment. Resendiz later died in a hospital.

This is not a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Members of the group, including Boice, admitted in court that they went to the motel for a confrontation. But some critics question whether the punishment fits the crime and if justice is being served.

Of the 26 people sitting before the bar in Judge Michael Griffin’s courtroom last week, Boice is the only apparent member of a minority group.

Looks can be deceiving; profiles of the jurors reveal that two have some Native American roots. One of Boice’s attorneys, Larry Lichter, is Jewish.

Still, there are very few people in this group of judge, attorneys and jurors who will say this trial is about race.

Boice, 23, could receive up to 40 years without the possibility of parole, virtually a life sentence. As he looks around the white-walled courtroom with its white, recessed-lighting ceiling and wipes his nose with the white Kleenex resting near the court-provided bottles of Calistoga water, he must be inwardly reeling. White judge, white jury, white attorneys—the only thing with a tint to it is the wood paneling and the audience.

Cast long across the courtroom is the shadow of gang member Resendiz, the man who had the life beat out of him. The Tokers are reputed to be longtime purveyors of methamphetamine to the Carson Valley. According to Boice’s supporters, Resendiz had a violent history, including an enmity to Native Americans. But Resendiz’ history is irrelevant, except as it relates to Boice’s defense that Resendiz claimed to have a gun.

The audience is a photographic negative to the group before the bar—maybe 35 Native Americans, four Latinos, four whites. Family members, cousins, in-laws, supporters from out of state, political organizers and the media observe quietly. Some take notes.

There are very few people in this latter group who will say this trial is not about race.

“To say it’s highly racial is kind of an understatement,” says Russ Redner. “It’s monumentally racial. The litmus test to that is that, in Carson City, they’re saying this trial is not racial. When you hear that—the minute they say you’re safe—you’d better duck.”

Redner is a founder of the American Indian Movement of Northern California and active in many of the high-profile Native-American civil-rights actions of the last 30 years, including the Leonard Peltier trial. He says that many people don’t understand the significance of this case because they won’t even acknowledge that Native Americans are still laboring under the punitive structure set up by the United States more than 150 years ago.

“The whole system is racial; most Americans ignore that there are still reservations today,” he says. “The reservation system was set up for no other reason than to subjugate people. When it was designed, it was set up as an extermination system. Historically, we have this overlay.”

He goes on to compare the case to the trial of Peltier, the Native American activist in prison since 1977, who’s been labeled a “political prisoner” by such international organizations as Amnesty International.

“There is no justice for native people in this country,” Redner says. “The few cases that we have won haven’t amounted to much. We’re not going to go on to a life of privilege and opportunity; we’re going back to the reservation. Sure, they’re not killing us, but they don’t have to, because they’ve taken everything else.”

He says the defendants in the Resendiz murder were originally threatened with the death penalty.

“They’ve jacked the bar so high that, even if it’s lowered, it’s still high. It’s racial because the charges are way out of sync with the evidence that they have, according to their own laws. If Rocky Boice is convicted, even though we have lowered that bar, he’s going to get 40 to life. I can’t find another case in modern times where they’ve taken this many Indian youths to trial at the same time. The only other case that this case comes close to is the Mankato hangings, when they hung 38 Dakota for leaving their reservation back in 1862.

“This case has been nothing but racial. When they reach the verdict and they find him guilty, I’m not going to be surprised.”

The basis of the hostility between the young Native Americans and the Latino gang is race, but Redner is careful to note that this trial is not about Latinos against Native Americans. In fact, Hispanic groups have come in from out of state to help diffuse the local tensions between Native Americans and Latinos. Still, local Native Americans say the gang has harassed them for so long that they send many young people to out-of-state schools. They claim that, despite complaints, the police and the schools have done nothing to stem the persecution.

One afternoon at a murder trial is analogous to the blind men discovering the elephant by feel. As long as each recognizes his perception is incomplete and relates the story accordingly, the truth will out.

This obvious racial polarization in the courtroom is a strange thing to a consumer of media. There have been few accounts about the racial underpinnings of this situation; for the most part newspapers and wire services have been covering the trial as though there were nothing remarkable happening in Carson City—just a murder trial.

One relevant fact is that Carson City has a 78.5 percent Caucasian population, according to the 2000 U.S. Census (the state is 65.2 percent non-Latino white people). That means three of the jurors should be, if circumstances were truly random, minorities. That doesn’t mean white people with a splash of minority blood; by percentage, it means minorities. Also relevant is the fact that bail for the 12 defendants was set low enough that none spent more than a few months in jail after the arrest—apparently, while they are considered a big enough threat to the community to be put away for the rest of their lives, they weren’t a great enough threat to put away while they await trial.

Attorney Lichter isn’t particularly surprised or dismayed by the white jury. Lichter, a San Francisco lawyer, is working the case for free. It’s his first murder trial in Nevada. His co-counsel is Day Williams of Carson City. It’s Williams’ first murder trial.

“A jury of your peers is not exactly the law in Nevada,” Lichter says, pointing out that several members of the original jury pool were excused because they were in some way related to Boice. The simple fact, he says, is that with a Native American population of about 1,300, “nearly every Native American in the area is related to Rocky.”

Still, the jury pool was properly selected from Department of Motor Vehicle Records, voter registration and utility-user records, says Lichter. Those are the rules.

This is not to say that the jurors are in any way racist. They look like a cross-section of suburban Carson City, good Americans all. Carson City, again, is far more homogenized than most of Nevada, and most juries in the state capital have a similar look.

But if one Carson City community is seeing nothing here but a murder trial and equal justice being served under the law, other Carson City communities are seeing something else. The Native American community has certainly turned out. Even national Native American groups, like the American Indian Movement, see something ominous. AIM has taken a profound interest in the trial. Founding members of the group, like Dennis Banks and Russ Redner, have journeyed to Carson City to protest the perceived racism against Native Americans.

“This is a mass injustice,” says Boice supporter James Cosner. “Just like everywhere in the world, there’s an irresponsible ruling class here. They don’t realize that everything you do has a consequence. That’s the way the Creator set it up. No one is above or below that.”

Ruling classes are hard to fathom in a trial where the defendant admits his presence in a room where somebody was killed. They’re difficult to conceive of, except when a young man could be sent away for his entire adult life for carrying a piece of broomstick into a room, especially when no forensic expert has claimed that he cast a killing blow. A ruling class is not so hard to conceive of when you look at the people wielding the power in this courtroom.

Were Boice and the others wrong to try to take justice into their own hands? That would depend on whether Carson City police truly refused to get involved in problems between the gang and the Native Americans, as Boice’s supporters say. Was Boice wrong to carry a two-foot length of broomstick to a confrontation with a gang with a violent reputation? That, too, is up to the jury to decide, but as the United States military would claim, sometimes the best way to preserve peace is to be prepared for war.

Can nine people each get a life sentence for the life of one man, even if he has not lived a blameless life? That’s up to the jury to decide. Three of the original defendants—David Moyle, Alejandro Avila and Julian Contreras—have pled guilty to lower charges. They all testified against Boice.

Carson City District Attorney Noel Waters did not return telephone calls for comment.

There are eight other Native American defendants in the murder to be tried in coming months: Jessica Evans, Frederick Fred, Lew Dutchy, Jaron Malone, Clint Malone, Mike Kizer, Elvin Fred and Sylvia Fred.

Boice’s father, Rocky Boice Sr., doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who thinks a lot about ruling classes. He says that there have always been racial divisions in Carson City. He attributes the prosecution of his son to a vendetta against his family by politically connected members of the Carson City community. He also attributes it to complaints his family made about harassment by gang members. He even attributes the prosecution in part to longstanding family problems with the law, some of them his.

“That’s the way it’s always been here,” he says.

Jurors began deliberating Boice’s fate Tuesday. They had not arrived at a verdict as of the RN&R press deadline.