No, Yellowstone is one of the outliers. The large majority of National Parks were established after statehood. Denali and Grand Canyon are two of the very few that were established (as actual National Parks) prior to the state being admitted.
Good points. But let’s continue this line of thinking. What is the type of case least likely to fit this scenario? A really heinous murder. If it’s that bad (like the one in Free Fire), the prosecutor is going to have a harder time offering you that sweet of a deal. Then, if it’s a choice between a sure thing of life in prison and a shot at either the death penalty or winning in the court of appeals and walking away with just a couple of misdemeanor weapons charges, it suddenly becomes much harder to just assume the guy would opt for the former.
I’d also note that your assessment doesn’t cover the decision by the prosecutor in the Montana case to condition the plea deal on the guy not appealing the issue. By telegraphing that they didn’t want the court of appeals to touch it, they were encouraging potential defendants to upgrade their estimate of the chances of prevailing there.
But the bottom line is the same: rather than have to concede anything to these criminals, why not fix the statute?
True–that’s actually a recurring theme in my recent work. But I can still hope, right? If the DOJ (or even just the U.S. Attorney for Wyoming) wanted this fixed, it would get fixed.
How many people can afford to finance a lengthy appeals process? Or, if they can afford it, want to spend their whole retirement fund doing it?
Most criminal defendants who go to trial already try to appeal whatever they can. It’s a rare trial that generates zero appealable issues.
Appeals aren’t that expensive anyway, relative to the cost of the trial. And that’s if you are paying at all; the Montana case discussed above was defended by a public defender, so it didn’t cost him a penny.
Because what difference does it make? So what if 1 person gets murdered and the criminal partially gets away with it? On a national scale it’s just not a big deal. And for most members of Congress, incumbency means they have no real fear of facing any loss of their seat. Odds are the member(s) of Congress who made this error is either an incumbent and will not lose his seat if this comes to light, or is no longer in Congress, and of course will face no consequence either.
I read that the modern clearance rate for murder was less than half. That means if someone murders someone tomorrow, they have a slightly better than 50% chance of just flat out getting away with it. I would assume murderers who are careful and don’t have an obvious connection to the victim that will be investigated probably have hugely better odds. I mean, I would imagine it’s hard to sleep at night knowing you might someday get prosecuted, since there’s no limitations, but that’s beside the point.
In this case, if you did murder someone at Yellowstone and were caught, you’re going to be punished. I would assume that the other charges, if the maximum sentence is given by a judge who knows you are getting away with murder, probably add up to more than 10 years in prison. Some countries, that is considered adequate punishment for murder that the perpetrator confessed to. I’ve read that’s about what a judge will give someone in Japan, and they do not have that many murders.
Anyways, they’ll maybe fix it when someone mows down a whole tour group or something. Something that actually makes the news.
ISTM that one root problem is the Sixth Amendment guaranteeing a right to trial by a jury composed from people of the same district. It harkens to ye old dayes where “them strangers from t’other places caint be trusted!”. In fact, as you all know, this right sometimes conflicts with the right to a fair trial (because the small jury member pool can be poisoned by news coverage) leading to motion for change of venue.
What other charges? If the theory holds, they would only be able to get you for stuff that is six months or less. Hard to imagine that many counts of it, though if there were I would expect the judge to order them to run consecutively rather than concurrently.
Conspiracy to commit murder? Obstruction of justice? Wire fraud? Use of a product not in accordance with it’s labeling? Unlawful transport of a firearm into a national park?
They could get creative here. Surely there’s lots of options. For example, if the victim is a friend, and the defendant called them up on a phone and invited them to the park, that’s wire fraud, right? If they fled the scene and then cleaned up at a place outside the exclusion zone, that’s obstruction of justice, right?
It’s not a problem, because districts are huge. The District of Wyoming has the smallest population of any of the state-based ones, and even it has hundreds of thousands of people in it. The problem is only created here from them coloring outside the lines.
In any case, a defendant has a right to a local jury and to an impartial jury. If he wants a change of venue and vicinage, he can waive the right to a local jury, but he is not forced to choose just one of the two rights and waive the other.
I happen to live in Idaho and I have to say if I was being brought up on some sort of gun charge I would much prefer to have my jury come from Idaho instead of say San Francisco since Idahoans don’t have an irrational fear of guns that may cause an biased opinion on the reasonableness of my actions.
There might be options, but only for crimes that are completed outside the Idaho portion of the park (or misdemeanors).
Transporting a firearm into a national park is perfectly legal, at least since 2010. Obstruction of justice is a fairly narrow crime, and generally requires some form of interaction with law enforcement. I can’t think for the life of me how you get to wire fraud. Conspiracy is only relevant if you actually conspire with someone.
but Ohio has never really been a state…
Unfortunately the real danger is not that a murderer would get away with it. The real danger is that judges will ignore the Constitution because it is inconvenient for the outcome they want.
That’s a crime, yes, but it requires an agreement between two or more people to commit the crime (and possibly an overt act in furtherance of the crime). In this instance, there is only one criminal.
Also a crime, but not one that magically happens when another crime happens. To obstruct justice you must take some affirmative step to hinder the discovery, apprehension, conviction or punishment of a crime in the course of a criminal investigation.
Yes, a crime, no, not applicable to this hypothetical.
Not a crime, unless perhaps the product is some sort of pesticide or chemical on a schedule found in the CFR.
It’s legal to bring firearms into national parks.
No, and no.
What about researching jurisdictions with problems empaneling qualified juries and then planning to commit crimes in those jurisdictions with the intent to avoid punishment because of those issues?
Once you start from the assumption that there are no rules, that the prosecution simply wins because they say so, then it seems to me there’s really not a lot of point in participating in a thread about actual nuances in actual rules.
Look at the Idaho strip on a map. There is no access to it. The road to Bechler Ranger Station runs through about half a mile of the Idaho strip, all told, coming from Wyoming and ending in Wyoming. No other roads enter Idaho Yellowstone, though a few come within a few hundred feet. One of my maps shows “West Boundary Trail”, but I see no sign of a proper trail on satellite – unless it is some sort of ski/snowmobile trail. There is nothing but trees, creeks, mountains and a few small lakes, at six to eight thousand feet elevation. Which is to say, the likelihood of a crime happening there is more remote than the strip itself.
It certainly would satisfy a premeditation element of any other crime. But so far as I am aware, it’s not a crime in and of itself.
I keep mine on the shelf right between Ethel the Aardvark goes Quantity Surveying, and Stu the Cockatoo is New at the Zoo. Get right back to ya.