The Case of the $12 Sheep

As workers of Idaho's rich Camas Prairie soil, four strapping young bucks from Indian reservations had the time, the money, and the inclination to go off on a hard-drinking tear every now & again although federal law prohibits sale of liquor to Indians. One night last October, roaring drunk, the four got caught up in the wheeze and clang of Idaho's legal machinery and almost mangled by it.

Cops arresting them for disturbing the peace heard a thumping in their car trunk, found a live sheep there. Under a law passed in 1864, animal thieving in Idaho is still grand larceny, so the Indians were hauled off to district court in Moscow. There, Prosecutor J. Morey O'Donnell put their worries too quickly to rest. They were lucky in having the most lenient judge in the state, said O'Donnell--and if they pleaded guilty, he certainly wouldn't hang them.-

What the four semiliterate and bewildered Indians didn't know was that even if they weren't hanged, they could get 14 years apiece for taking a $12 sheep, and that, after pleading guilty, is what they got.

When the story got out, there was a hue & cry about "white man's justice." Novelist Oliver (Laughing Boy) LaFarge and his Association on American Indian Affairs appealed the case to Idaho's Supreme Court on the ground that the defendants were "not competent" to plead guilty without lawyers. Last week the court voided District Judge Albert Morgan's sentence, ordered a new trial. But perhaps the case would be dropped. The people of Idaho, thought Prosecutor O'Donnell (as surprised as anyone at the severity of the sentence), "don't want these Indians prosecuted any further."

-In Idaho the law requires the judge to give maximum sentences; the State Board of Correction decides the amount of time to be served, usually much less.

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