ONEIDA, N.Y. — A civil suit against Oneida Men’s Council member Clint Hill
over a 2002 “belly-bumping” incident can go forward in the New York state
court system, a state judge ruled on Aug. 8.

State Supreme Court Judge William O’Brien allowed the suit to proceed on
two of the original five accusations. Maisie Shenandoah and her daughter
Diane Schenandoah, Oneida tribal members who are long-standing critics of
the tribal government, will sue on complaints of assault and willful
misconduct.

(In New York state, the Supreme Court is the lowest rung of the state
judicial system.)

The incident occurred July 7, 2002, while the two women were walking across
Hill’s lot on the 32-acre Oneida Territory Road reservation, in the company
of two officers from the Madison County Sheriff’s Department. According to
the complaint, Hill accosted the group and bumped Diane with his torso. She
was knocked back into her mother, then 70, who fell on the gravel driveway,
hitting her head.

According to reports at the time, the two women had invited the deputies to
meet with a psychic who they said might help locate the body of Tammy
Mahoney, a missing young woman allegedly murdered on the reservation in
1981.

In 2002, the bumping incident gave rise to tribal criminal charges heard in
the Oneida tribal court’s first jury trial. Hill was acquitted when his
accusers decided not to testify. A parallel case in Oneida City Court was
dropped in 2004 when a state appeals court ruled that it would constitute
double jeopardy.

Although that ruling might have been appealed under the U.S. Supreme
Court’s United States v. Lara decision, which maintained that prosecution
by separate sovereignties did not constitute double jeopardy, such a course
would have put the plaintiffs in the ironic position of defending the
legitimacy of a tribal institution they had earlier repudiated.

The issue in the civil suit was whether it had been filed in a timely
fashion. State law requires such suits to be filed within a year of the
termination of the underlying criminal case. Hill’s lawyer’s argued the
case had ended in 2002 with his acquittal in tribal court. O’Brien ruled,
however, that it had ended in March 2004, when the state appeals court
stopped the proceedings in Oneida City Court.

O’Brien dismissed three counts of the civil complaint and ordered that it
drop references to the tribal political dispute. A date for the next
hearing has not yet been set.