Vancouver, British Columbia – A court on Tuesday denied a Canadian man’s appeal of an order that he be extradited to the United States to stand trial in the 1975 killing of an American Indian activist who was kidnapped from a Denver home.
John Graham had been under house arrest since he was charged in December 2003 with first-degree murder in the killing Anna Mae Pictou Aquash on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in late 1975, three months after she was abducted.
Her body was found in 1976; she had been shot in the head.
Greg Del Bigio, one of Graham’s lawyers, said the defense may appeal the case again to Canada’s Supreme Court. If an appeal is not filed within two months, Graham could be extradited to the U.S.
Aquash’s slaying came amid a series of bloody clashes in the mid-1970s between federal agents and members of the American Indian Movement. Aquash, a member of Mi’kmaq Tribe of Canada, was among Indian militants who had occupied Wounded Knee, S.D., for 71 days in 1973.
Prosecutors have said AIM leaders ordered Aquash’s killing because they suspected she was a government informant. AIM leaders have denied that assertion.
The other man charged with killing Aquash, Fritz Arlo Looking Cloud, received a life sentence in 2004 after a federal jury in Rapid City, S.D., convicted him of first-degree murder committed in the perpetration of a kidnapping. A federal appeals court upheld the conviction.
Looking Cloud was arrested on East Colfax Avenue in Denver in 2003.
Graham has said he’s innocent, but the Canadian judge who issued Tuesday’s ruling disagreed.
“In my opinion, a properly instructed jury acting reasonably could convict on the evidence that the appellant brought the deceased from Denver to South Dakota and, there, carried out her execution with the assistance of Looking Cloud,” Justice Ian Donald wrote.
Witnesses at Looking Cloud’s trial testified that Graham shot Aquash, whose family exhumed her body in 2004 from an Oglala, S.D., grave and reburied it in her native Nova Scotia. A Canadian judge ruled in 2005 that Graham should be extradited, and the Canadian minister of justice affirmed that decision last year.
