Re: Alaska boys are sentenced by Tlingit Tribal court
apodaca@nexus.chapman.edu
Mon, 5 Sep 1994 00:11:54 -0800
News reports on television in Southern California carried interviews with
Rudy James wherein court judgements against him totalling tens of thousand
s of dollars were revealed including $17k he owed in child support for his
own offspring. The reports further interviewed tribal court members who
were, in the majority, relatives of Rudy James, many of whom have prison
records on a variety of charges including rape. Tlingit community members
who were interviewed denounced Rudy James as a self aggrandizing individual
who was making up a tradition of banishment that none of the elders could
recall. The Washington State judge who transferred the case to Rudy James
would not comment on the fitness of the James family to be judges in the
case, characterizing the question as an attempt to discredit another
nation's system of justice. When told by the on-camera reporter that he had
heard that Rudy owed a lot of people a lot of money Rudy James, tribal
elder, sacred tradition keeper and judge of his court replied, "I heard you
were a queer."
Paul Apodaca