Biography
Darrelle Dean (Dino) Butler was an American Indian Movement organizer present at the Jumping Bull family compound on the Pine Ridge Reservation on June 26, 1975 when FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams were killed in the firefight that followed their entry into the compound. He, Robert Robideau, Leonard Peltier, and Jimmy Eagle were federally indicted for the agents murders. He was held in pretrial detention from his September 1975 arrest until his July 1976 acquittal alongside Robideau in U.S. District Court in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where the jury accepted the defense argument of self-defense in the climate of the Pine Ridge reign of terror.
After his acquittal he became a longtime AIM and Free Leonard Peltier organizer, and lived for many years in Oregon. He died on June 6, 2024.
The September issue reports the July Cedar Rapids federal acquittal of Robert Robideau and Darelle Butler in the Pine Ridge FBI-agent murder case. It quotes the foreman saying jurors did not believe the government established the defendants fired the fatal shots and rejected witness James Harper’s claimed confession account. Life imprisonment was their exposure, not an imposed or served term. The report supplies no exact physical release day.
A July 20, 1976 FBI teletype dates Butler’s arrest to September 5, 1975.
