Robert Robideau

Robert Eugene Robideau was an American Indian Movement organizer and a member of the AIM spiritual encampment at the Jumping Bull family compound on the Pine Ridge Reservation on June 26, 1975, when FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams entered the compound in unmarked cars looking for an alleged stolen-boots suspect and were killed in the firefight that followed. He, Darrelle Dean Butler, 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 at trial in U.S. District Court in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where the jury accepted the defense argument that the defendants had fired in self-defense in the climate of the Pine Ridge reign of terror.

After his acquittal he became one of the principal organizers of the international Free Leonard Peltier campaign and a longtime spokesperson for AIM. He died on February 17, 2009 at age 62. A 1978 Longest Walk declaration reproduced in the Congressional Record identifies Robideau as imprisoned at Leavenworth, Kansas, on charges arising from his flight from prosecution. It separately records his jury acquittal in the FBI-agent murder case. This confirms that the acquittal did not establish his physical release.