Charges Dismissed Against Oliphant

Two months after the end of the Wounded Knee occupation charges have been dropped against Boston Globe reporter Thomas Oliphant.

Oliphant was arrested April 23, six days after he accompanied five men who attempted to air-drop food provisions to Indians occupying the South Dakota town.

A Washington-based reporter for The Boston Globe, Oliphant faced a battery of charges, including that of violating a Federal law prohibiting interstate travel with the purpose of inciting violence.

Charges were dropped Thursday with the approval of Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson '41, the Globe reported Friday. Richardson was appointed to his present office shortly after the voluntary surrender of the armed occupants of Wounded Knee, who dramatized their protest of the Federal government's treatment of Indians by holding up in the South Dakota town for 70 days.

Oliphant cited three main reasons for the Justice Department's recommendations to discard the indictments.

He said yesterday that he believes the most important element was the lack of grounds for the accusations. He also speculated that the Department was uncomfortable about the charges of wire-tapping that Oliphant's lawyer brought forward.

The reporter added that he felt the Justice Department is now "in more sane hands" than when the charges against him were first made.

Although he was the only journalist at Wounded Knee formally charged with conspiracy to incite riot, Oliphant volunteered that "in a broader context" he had been arrested to "frighten away others or steer them away" from first-person coverage of the siege of the South Dakota town.

Asked whether he felt the Justice Department's decision to drop charges indicated an effort to placate a generally aroused media, Oliphant said that the indictment was discarded when he and his lawyers had made manifest their intention to fight "like wounded steers.