More than 3.5 million people visit Yellowstone—the jewel in the United States's national park crown—every year. They gawk at the geysers, crisscross the canyons,
bond with the bison, and take selfies with the scenery. So far no one,
as far as I know, has ever gone to Yellowstone to commit murder, murder
most foul. But it's not a bad spot for it! (If you're a murderer—and we
don't advocate that you become one.) The park actually contains a narrow corridor less
than two miles wide where evildoers could do literally anything, and the
law couldn't touch them. Beware when you enter…the Yellowstone Murder
Zone.
Yellowstone is too big for any one state to contain.
Yellowstone National Park is a wilderness area the
size of Rhode Island, so vast that it's the only national park that
includes part of three different states (Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana).
The bulk of the park is in Wyoming, and so Congress has given Wyoming's
federal court district jurisdiction over the entire park, even the tiny
slivers in Idaho and Montana. It's the only court district in America
that covers multiple states.
How to get away with hiking, and murder.
But here's the problem: The Sixth Amendment to the
Constitution requires that criminal cases be tried "by an impartial jury
of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed."
That's called the vicinage clause, and assembling a local jury is
usually no problem.
But what if you went on a crime spree in the 50
square miles of Yellowstone that's part of the state of Idaho? Your jury
would need to come from both the state (Idaho) and district (Wyoming)
where the crime was committed. It turns out there aren't 12 permanent
residents of the Idaho wilderness that's part of Yellowstone. In fact,
there isn't even one!...more
Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
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