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BACKGROUND: The Norman Transcript: Local Columnist Andy Rieger: January 24, 2025. 'Young attorney faced the case of a lifetime: "Longtime Norman attorney Gary Pitchlynn was barely out of Oklahoma City University’s night law school when he got a phone call one spring morning in 1978. Gene Leroy Hart, accused of killing and raping three young Girl Scout campers, had finally been captured and the Cherokee Nation, secretly at first, wanted an attorney to meet with Hart at the state prison in McAlester. Pitchlynn, along with a fellow attorney Garvin Isaacs, made the drive only to determine after they arrived that Hart had been flown to the county jail in Pryor, OK., earlier that day. Not wanting to give up that easy, the pair drove to Pryor and, with the help of an Oklahoma judge, had their first meeting with Hart. The two young attorneys were only there to make sure Hart understood his rights and didn’t make statements that could come back to hinder his defense. Later, a more experienced defense attorney would take over, they presumed. What Pitchlynn thought would be one day’s absence from his Oklahoma City office took one year instead after he and Isaacs became Hart’s attorneys. After more than 45 years, Pitchlynn has written a book about the trial, Hart’s eventual acquittal, injustices in the criminal justice system, the Native American influence and the misconduct he and others have alleged among law enforcement, prosecutors and the trial judge himself. “The Usual Suspect” recounts the celebrated 1977 case of the Girl Scout murders at Camp Scott in northeast Oklahoma. Pitchlynn toyed with the idea of writing the book years ago but life got in the way. “Initially I resisted it,” he said. “It was too fresh. Too hard on the victims’ families and the Hart family. I just decided I didn’t have the heart to do it early on.” He thought about getting an agent and going the traditional route of publishing. Non-fiction is not where it’s at these days,” he said. “It’s not about getting famous or making a lot of money. I just wanted to tell the story. He finally sat down and self-published the book which is available on Amazon. His wife, Joyce, edited the manuscript. Much of it is from memory, the team’s filings and news clippings as there was never a trial transcript produced. “It was exciting, it was exhilarating, all the adjectives you can think of and it was tiring,” he recalls of Hart’s defense. He recounts midnight visits to Cherokee Medicine Men, bake sales to raise defense expense money and sleepless nights on the floor of an old building that doubled as a donated office. Isaacs had the benefit of earlier murder trials as a public defender in Oklahoma County but Pitchlynn’s experience was more limited. In the media’s eyes, they were the brash young attorneys taking on the establishment sheriff, Tulsa County District Attorney and the OSBI. Pitchlynn recalls the state was quick to assign guilt to Hart who was no stranger to the law. He had escaped from jail twice and was embarrassed the sheriff. “But the case was just too tidy,” he said. “There’s a tendency in law enforcement to create a kind of tunnel vision. They were all lead to believe in the case.” That case eventually unraveled at trial as Pitchlynn and Isaacs poked holes in the state’s circumstantial evidence against their client. Jurors deliberated less than a day before returning not guilty verdicts on all three counts. The book is an insider’s look at a justice system where defendants without resources don’t have the same chance as those who can afford the best representation, expert witnesses and cutting edge scientific testing . Is the system better and less culturally and economically biased today than in 1979? “It probably is better for people who can afford the kind of defense we gave Gene,” Pitchlynn said. “When you’ve got a lot of money, you can put up a pretty good fight.”
https://www.normantranscript.com/young-attorney-faced-the-case-of-a-lifetime/article_87d12bd2-dab9-11ef-a203-93a563f027a0.html
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The Usual Suspect: Amazon:
https://www.amazon.ca/USUAL-SUSPECT-DEFENSE-MURDER-ATTORNEYS-ebook/dp/B0DR37CXXX
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Q and A: Black Wall Street Times: (BWST):
PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "BWST: You and Garvin Isaacs weren’t the defense team the public expected. How did your Choctaw identity shape your approach to the case?……….Gary Pitchlynn: Being Native made me deeply suspicious of the system. That hasn’t changed. It’s a system that has to be driven — you have to fight for it to work. In my early years, outside of the Hart case, I was threatened with contempt multiple times just for challenging prosecutors and police officers. Judges protected them. But I understood — because of my background — that blind trust in the system would get my clients nowhere. It also helped me gain Gene’s trust quickly."
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STORY: "Inside the trial that exposed Oklahoma's broken justice system: Q and A with Gary Pitchlyn, by Deon Osborne, published by The Black Wall Street Times, on July 10, 2025. . (Deon Osborne was born in Minneapolis, MN and raised in Lawton, OK before moving to Norman where he attended the University of Oklahoma. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Strategic Media and has written for OU’s student newspaper the OU Daily as well as OKC-based Red Dirt Report. He now lives in Tulsa and serves as the Managing Editor for The Black Wall Street Times. He is also a former intern at Oklahoma Policy Institute.)
SUB-HEADING: "Gary Pitchlynn, defense attorney for a Cherokee man accused in the 1977 Girl Scout murders case, reflects on the trial’s lasting impact and his new book The Usual Suspect.
SUB-HEADING: "The Case That Shattered Trust in Oklahoma’s Justice System:
What unfolded was a trial riddled with misconduct: planted evidence, perjured testimonies, and a rush to judgment fueled by racial bias. Hart was acquitted, but the damage to public trust was profound."
SUB-HEADING: "Gary Pitchlynn, defence attorney for a Cherokee man accused in the 1977 Girl Scouts murders case, reflects on the trial’s lasting impact and his new book The Usual Suspect."
GIST: "For more than 45 years, Gary Pitchlynn (Choctaw Nation) has fought for tribal nations across Oklahoma — from courtroom benches to tribal government halls. Today he serves as Attorney General for the Absentee Shawnee Tribe and Associate Judge for the Quapaw Nation Tribal Court, but decades ago, a single case changed the course of his career.
Fresh out of law school, Pitchlynn found himself at the center of the 1977 Girl Scout murders at Camp Scott, one of Oklahoma’s most infamous criminal cases.
Tasked with defending Gene Leroy Hart, a Cherokee man accused of the horrific crimes, Pitchlynn and fellow attorney Garvin Isaacs confronted not only a system stacked against Indigenous people, but also a rush to judgment that exposed deep cracks in Oklahoma’s criminal justice system.
In his book, The Usual Suspect, Pitchlynn recounts a trial marked by missing evidence, prosecutorial misconduct, and cultural bias, errors that continue today.
Speaking with the Black Wall Street Times, Pitchlynn reflected on that trial, the enduring failures of the system, and why justice for Indigenous people, and all marginalized Oklahomans, remains a battle still being fought.
A Conversation with Gary Pitchlynn
BWST: When you took on the defense of Gene Leroy Hart, you were a young attorney fresh out of law school. What was going through your mind?
Gary Pitchlynn: I was less than a year out of law school. Honestly, at first, I thought I’d just be carrying water for some high-octane criminal lawyer from out of state. But when Gene asked Garvin and me to take charge ourselves, we had already built a relationship, and I couldn’t say no.
From the beginning, I believed the sheriff was trigger-happy. Within 45 minutes of arriving at the campgrounds, Sheriff Pete Weaver was already targeting Hart — before any real investigation. So, it sort of confirmed both my and Garvin’s initial impressions of the case from afar as to how those cultural things played out.
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BWST: Your book highlights failures in the state’s case — missing evidence, misconduct, and tunnel vision. What’s one moment from the trial that still sticks with you?
Gary Pitchlynn: During the preliminary hearing, one officer testified about the search of the house where Gene was captured. His story didn’t sit right with me. We got permission to search the house ourselves — and found nothing. Weeks later, law enforcement “found” a corn cob pipe, a mirror, and cutouts of young girls. They tried to introduce it at trial. But we knew — because we had already searched — that they planted that evidence. So, we knew at that point they were planting evidence and they were lying from the witness stand.
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BWST: You and Garvin Isaacs weren’t the defense team the public expected. How did your Choctaw identity shape your approach to the case?
Gary Pitchlynn: Being Native made me deeply suspicious of the system. That hasn’t changed. It’s a system that has to be driven — you have to fight for it to work. In my early years, outside of the Hart case, I was threatened with contempt multiple times just for challenging prosecutors and police officers. Judges protected them. But I understood — because of my background — that blind trust in the system would get my clients nowhere. It also helped me gain Gene’s trust quickly.
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BWST: You describe visits with Cherokee Medicine Men and other cultural experiences. What did those moments teach you about law and responsibility?
Gary Pitchlynn: It showed me that regardless of race or culture, most people share a common understanding of right and wrong. Whether you pray to God, Allah, or the sun, the basic principles of justice are the same. The problem is whether those principles are applied equally. They weren’t back then, and they often still aren’t today. My responsibility as an advocate was to try and balance those scales, even when the system fought back.
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BWST: Even with DNA evidence decades later coming back inconclusive, local law enforcement still insists Gene Leroy Hart was guilty. Why do you think that narrative persists?
Gary Pitchlynn:
Well, I think the reason that that persists, at least in my estimation, is that that case was so big and there were so many people that I think hoped their part in the prosecution was going to advance their careers significantly. The loss of that case tore all that down. In sports and other activities we all lose from time to time, and the ability to admit your defeat and lick your wounds and walk away and go on to the next one and hold your head up is something that law enforcement doesn’t seem to have. It’s something that prosecutors don’t seem to have."
The entire story can be read at:
https://theblackwallsttimes.com/2025/04/28/inside-the-trial-that-exposed-oklahomas-broken-justice-system-qa-with-gary-pitchlynn/
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
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FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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