Convicted cocaine dealer should take responsibility

By the Rapid City Journal Editorial Board | Tuesday, April 10, 2007

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It’s been said that prisons are full of innocent people — if you ask the inmates.

That appears to be the case in the sad but incredible story of Geraldine Blue Bird. She is a woman who was once considered a role model on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, who once had the ear of a U.S. president, and now a woman who will spend the next 34 years in federal prison.

The sad part is that she once was a benevolent caregiver, who took children in need into her home and fed and housed them, despite not having much herself. But she went from being a do-gooder to a wealthy drug dealer, and was labeled as the ringleader of a gang of more than two dozen people — including her 26-year-old son — who trafficked an estimated $2 million worth of cocaine from Denver to Pine Ridge between 2002 and 2005.

The incredible part of Blue Bird’s story is that despite all the overwhelming evidence and testimony at her trial last fall and her sentencing hearing in U.S. District Court last week, she appears to be in complete denial that she was at fault for providing illegal drugs to reservation residents. She even had children in the home from which she was dealing drugs.

And she accepted government-issued debit cards that were to be used to buy food as payment for drugs, putting the blame on the buyers: “They make that decision. I can’t force anybody ... to do anything.

“I’m being held responsible for a lot of things I wasn’t involved in,” Blue Bird told U.S. District Judge Karen Schreier last Wednesday.

But Assistant U.S. Attorney Mara Kohn countered, saying, “She refuses to take responsibility for the harm that she has done to these people.”

It’s been a winding road - with one major switchback — for Blue Bird, from being honored by President Clinton in 1999 for her good works to being convicted of a variety of cocaine, marijuana and firearms charges in 2006.

She betrayed the trust of her community, and should at least have the decency to own up to it.