Amelia Schafer
ICT
RAPID CITY, South Dakota – The Pennington County State’s Attorney’s office has dropped all charges against NDN Collective founder Nick Tilsen.
Tilsen, Oglala Lakota, was charged with aggravated assault against a law enforcement officer, obstruction of a law enforcement officer and later simple assault on an officer, all stemming from a 2022 cop watch in downtown Rapid City, South Dakota.
Tilsen faced up to 26 years in prison.
A late-January trial in Rapid City resulted in a mistrial after a 12-person jury could not come to a unanimous verdict. The State’s Attorney’s Office declined to respond to what the jury’s hung vote result was. The dismissal announcement came 46 days after the original trial.
“The decision to dismiss this case was made after careful review and thoughtful consideration,” said Pennington County State’s Attorney Lara Roetzel in a March 16 statement. “Our office prosecuted this case based on the evidence and the law, and we remain confident that the charges were appropriate to bring.”
In the statement, a state’s attorney’s office representative said the decision followed a careful review of evidence and the overall case, after which the state decided pursuing a retrial would not “be the most effective use of limited prosecutorial and court resources.”
“My freedom wasn’t granted by a judge, a jury, or the settler colonial court system,” Tilsen said in a press release on March 16. “My freedom was won by the people, the movement, and the ancestors. We organized, prayed, wrote, called, and fought these politically motivated charges with integrity, deep principles, and strong beliefs.”
However, Roetzel said the decision to drop charges was not driven by public pressure or commentary, but rather by evidence, the law and an obligation to exercise “sound judgement.”
Tilsen said the charges were politically motivated, having been filed over a year after the alleged assault and immediately after the NDN Collective announced a Fourth of July protest in 2023.
“The Pennington County State’s Attorney’s office fought tooth and nail to put me in prison because they are afraid of the power we are building,” Tilsen said in the release. “They’re afraid because we aren’t just speaking truth to power – we are successfully building new solutions, exercising our rights, and changing the state’s violent systems that have oppressed Indigenous people for hundreds of years.”
The post Charges dropped against Nick Tilsen in law enforcement assault case appeared first on ICT.
From ICT via This RSS Feed.