Indian Land
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https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/09/supreme-court-oklahoma-tribal-reservation-354945
‘The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a large chunk of eastern Oklahoma remains an American Indian reservation, a decision that state and federal officials have warned could throw Oklahoma into chaos.
The court’s 5-4 decision, written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, means that Oklahoma prosecutors lack the authority to pursue criminal cases against American Indian defendants in parts of Oklahoma that include most of Tulsa, the second-largest city.
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The conclusion:
"The federal government promised the Creek a reservation in perpetuity. Over time, Congress has diminished that reservation. It has sometimes restricted and other times expanded the Tribe’s authority. But Congress has never withdrawn the promised reservation. As a result, many of the arguments before us today follow a sadly familiar pattern. Yes, promises were made, but the price of keeping them has become too great, so now we should just cast a blind eye. We reject that thinking. If Congress wishes to withdraw its promises, it must say so. Unlawful acts, performed long enough and with sufficient vigor, are never enough to amend the law. To hold otherwise would be to elevate the most brazen and longstanding injustices over the law, both rewarding wrong and failing those in the right.
The judgment of the Court of Criminal Appeals of Oklahoma is Reversed."
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@Axtremus said in Indian Land:
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/09/supreme-court-oklahoma-tribal-reservation-354945
It takes Politico 15 paragraphs to get to the crux of the case before SCOTUS:
The case the justices decided Thursday involved 71-year-old Jimcy McGirt, who is serving a 500-year prison sentence for molesting a child. Oklahoma state courts rejected his argument that his case does not belong in Oklahoma state courts and that federal prosecutors should instead handle his case.
McGirt could potentially be retried in federal court, as could Patrick Murphy, who was convicted of killing a fellow tribe member in 1999 and sentenced to death. But Murphy would not face the death penalty in federal court for a crime in which prosecutors said he mutilated the victim and left him to bleed to death on the side of a country road about 80 miles (130 kilometers) southeast of Tulsa.
The lawyers at Powerline comment:
The case involved Jimcy McGirt. He was convicted of molesting, raping, and forcibly sodomizing a four-year-old girl, his wife’s granddaughter. The State of Oklahoma imposed what amounts to a life sentence on this pervert.
The Court majority didn’t dispute the obvious justice of this sentence. However, it found that it contravenes federal law, as set forth in the Major Crimes Act. This Act provides that, within “the Indian country,” “[a]ny Indian who commits” certain enumerated offenses “against the person or property of another Indian or any other person” “shall be subject to the same law and penalties as all other persons committing any of the above offenses, within the exclusive jurisdiction of the United States.” Rape is not among the enumerated crimes.
The question, then, was whether McGirt, a Seminole Indian, committed his crimes in “Indian country.” The location where he committed them was once a Creek Indian reservation. However, it is no longer one. Congress disestablished any such reservation in a series of statutes leading up to Oklahoma statehood at the turn of the 19th century. Nonetheless, Judge Gorsuch and the four left-liberals concluded that McGirt committed his crimes in Indian country.
Chief Justice Roberts’ dissenting opinion heaps well-deserved ridicule on the majority’s ruling:
Today, the Court holds that Oklahoma lacked jurisdiction to prosecute McGirt—on the improbable ground that, unbeknownst to anyone for the past century, a huge swathe of Oklahoma is actually a Creek Indian reservation, on which the State may not prosecute serious crimes committed by Indians like McGirt. Not only does the Court discover a Creek reservation that spans three million acres and includes most of the city of Tulsa, but the Court’s reasoning portends that there are four more such reservations in Oklahoma. The rediscovered reservations encompass the entire eastern half of the State—19 million acres that are home to 1.8 million people, only 10%–15% of whom are Indians.
Across this vast area, the State’s ability to prosecute serious crimes will be hobbled and decades of past convictions could well be thrown out. On top of that, the Court has profoundly destabilized the governance of eastern Oklahoma. The decision today creates significant uncertainty for the State’s continuing authority over any area that touches Indian affairs, ranging from zoning and taxation to family and environmental law.
None of this is warranted. What has gone unquestioned for a century remains true today: A huge portion of Oklahoma is not a Creek Indian reservation. Congress disestablished any reservation in a series of statutes leading up to Oklahoma statehood at the turn of the 19th century. The Court reaches the opposite conclusion only by disregarding the “well settled” approach required by our precedents. Nebraska v. Parker, 577 U. S. 481, ___ (2016) (slip op., at 5).
Under those precedents, we determine whether Congress intended to disestablish a reservation by examining the relevant Acts of Congress and “all the [surrounding] circumstances,” including the “contemporaneous and subsequent understanding of the status of the reservation.” Id., at ___ (slip op., at 6) (internal quotation marks omitted). Yet the Court declines to consider such understandings here, preferring to examine only individual statutes in isolation.
Applying the broader inquiry our precedents require, a reservation did not exist when McGirt committed his crimes, so Oklahoma had jurisdiction to prosecute him.
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Count on conservative judges to hold to that standard more than liberal ones. Actually that gets to the heart of the difference between those two classifications. I believe that a bias-free application of the law would be viewed as conservative. But of course my contention that there is a truth there about level of bias as measured against the letter of the law, would paint me as a conservative as well.
