10 ms·

Zone of Death (Yellowstone)

96 points by yawz 6y ago

BitwiseFool 6y ago
Let's assume a court convicted someone of murder within this zone. Let's also assume the evidence was overwhelming and the act was premeditated because the murderer had knowledge of the Sixth Amendment and this loophole. The case makes it's way to the Supreme Court. But because of the bizarre nature of the loophole SCOTUS simply chooses not to hear appeal and lets the conviction stand. This is how the law could be enforced while technically violating the Sixth Amendment.
- littlestymaar 6y ago
  If it's premeditated, it has likely been premeditated somewhere else. If so, isn't the premeditation in itself a crime for which you could be prosecuted (in the place where you planned everything).
  - jackhalford 6y ago
    So technically the planning and premeditation also needs to be done in the death zone.
  - jaywalk 6y ago
    Ummm, no. While premeditation enhances the murder charge and mens rea is a very important legal concept, thoughts are not crimes.
    - MrZongle2 6y ago
      Not yet.
    - anamexis 6y ago
      If they told someone else about it before hand, could it be conspiracy?
    - saluki 6y ago
      Until we have PreCrime.
  - BurningFrog 6y ago
    I'm not a lawyer, but I've listened to several podcasts! If you have planned the murder with someone else, that is a conspiracy, which is a serious crime in itself. You don't even need to attempt the murder. If you were just premeditating in your own mind, that is not a crime. Though it might be a factor in sentencing for the actual crime. If the premeditation involves writing down plans with maps etc, then... I haven't listened to that episode yet.
    - lqet 6y ago
      > If the premeditation involves writing down plans with maps etc, then... Just add a preface: "Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental."
- eganist 6y ago
  > Let's assume a court convicted someone of murder within this zone. Let's also assume the evidence was overwhelming and the act was premeditated because the murderer had knowledge of the Sixth Amendment and this loophole. The case makes it's way to the Supreme Court. But because of the bizarre nature of the loophole SCOTUS simply chooses not to hear appeal and lets the conviction stand. This is how the law could be enforced while technically violating the Sixth Amendment. How would a conviction take place without a jury? Even in the Belderrain case in the Montana section of the park, a jury was never formed; there was only an initial ruling that a trial could move forward despite the risk of partiality, but the case was settled with a plea agreement where the defendant waived any right to pursuing the Zone of Death legal challenge. (can an attorney fact-check me here, by the way? I'm definitely not one)
  - tom_mellior 6y ago
    > How would a conviction take place without a jury? I believe the parent's point was that it could take place with a jury from anywhere else, thereby violating the letter of the 6th amendment, but without this having an effect: The convicted person would have to appeal the conviction, but no higher court would decide to hear the appeal. (I'm not a lawyer either, I'm just writing down my understanding of what the parent said.)
ballenf 6y ago
Such a terrible moniker for this swath of land where assembling a jury for a criminal trial would be difficult if not impossible. "Death" is just related to one of the possible crimes that would be problematic to prosecute. But even so, the way plea deals work a defendant would have to be quite idealistic or dumb to go to trial with that as a sole defense. This is the only time in history when a headline like "Yellowstone's one weird trick they don't want you to know" would actually be kind of true.
- jetpackjoe 6y ago
  In theory, this would never get to trial.
  - goodcanadian 6y ago
    In practice, I would be surprised if any court up to and including the Supreme Court would find this loophole an acceptable defense. It could certainly be a long complicated legal battle, but ultimately, I doubt the Supreme Court would find that the intent of the Sixth Amendment was to allow criminals to go free in this situation.
    - lisper 6y ago
      They don't have to find it an acceptable defense, all they would have to do is find that it is not possible to legally try the suspect. Which is in fact the case. But of course they would try him anyway because doing end-runs around the text of the Constitution is standard operating procedure and has been since the founding. Even the whole idea of the Supreme Court having the power to declare laws unconstitutional is found nowhere in the Constitution. That was a power invented by the Supreme Court in Marbury v Madison. There are many other examples. On a strict textual reading of the Constitution, if the second amendment applies to an individual right to bear arms (which is debatable, but that's what the Supreme Court has most recently held) there is no basis for denying individuals the right to have WMDs. There is no basis for making slander and libel crimes under the First Amendment, but we do, and no one argues with it. Likewise, if someone committed murder in the "death zone" they would be tried somewhere and convicted and the Supreme Court would simply refuse to hear the appeal. And that would be that.
DougN7 6y ago
How is this different from a crime that happens in the middle of nowhere somewhere else? There are lots of places with no inhabitants and no courts.
- pfarrell 6y ago
  IANAL. The loophole purports to originate from the federal juries needing to be made of people from the federal district _and_ state. Presumably, all the sparsely populated places are restricted to a single state and contained in federal court districts large enough to include enough people to assemble a jury.
- jandrese 6y ago
  This is a little different than for example the deep ocean where nobody has jurisdiction. In this case the Federal Government has jurisdiction, but due to a quirk of the laws would be impossible to prosecute someone for a crime committed there. For the most part it isn't an issue because, as previously noted, nobody lives there. There is nobody around to commit crimes. There is also precious little there to commit crimes against. If this loophole ever actually came up I'd expect it to be over something like illegal logging, not a murder.
- ghaff 6y ago
  However, if the areas are sparsely inhabited both the federal and the state districts are correspondingly large. You'd never have an entire district that people don't live in even if large areas of the district have no inhabitants or courts. The issue here is that because all of Yellowstone is in the federal district of Wyoming--including the parts that aren't in Wyoming, you'd need someone who lived in the federal district of Wyoming and the state district of Idaho to sit on a jury. That's a null set.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
fasteddie31003 6y ago
This name will be more descriptive when Yellowstone erupts in 1,000's of years in the future.
littlestymaar 6y ago
Depending of what crime you commit, you could still be prosecuted… in another country where the principle of _universal juridiction_[1] applies. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_jurisdiction#Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_jurisdiction#Austral...
- squeaky-clean 6y ago
  The original paper (reference 6 on the wiki page) also mentions they could still constitutionally get you for a misdemeanor > Another possibility is for prosecutors to concentrate on lesser offenses - those with maximum sentences of six months or less - that do not require a jury trial. Again, these misdemeanors may be lesser charges than the ones to which you would be subject in other districts, but they are better than nothing, they will dissuade some criminals, and, most important, they can be prosecuted constitutionally. And also that if you actually committed a very serious crime, it's very likely you committed some other crime along the way while outside of the "zone of death", conspiracy, firearm violation, or something.
  - fedreserved 6y ago
    A year max for murder. I could do that standing on my head
pixelbreaker 6y ago
I've cycled through here when racing Tour Divide (I think it just goes through the bottom of the zone). I should have murdered all the other racers.
- pixelbreaker 6y ago
  Oh, the route went along Grassy Lake Rd just south of the zone. Shame. Or rather, lucky I didn't execute my plan.
arithmomachist 6y ago
I'm a little surprised no one has fought a duel there.
- proverbialbunny 6y ago
  Duels are legal in a lot of the US, so not really necessary.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
> A federal judge ruled that Belderrain could be tried in the U.S. District Court for the District of Wyoming, despite the Sixth Amendment problem. Belderrain cited Kalt's paper "The Perfect Crime" to explain why he believed it was illegal to have his trial with a jury from a state other than where the crime was committed. The court dismissed this argument. Judges especially Federal judges are far less impressed by "hacks" and "loopholes" of the system, than most programmers. There is no chance they will let a premeditated murder go unpunished on the basis of some obscure technicality like this.
- MegaButts 6y ago
  Then why do we even have laws? Seriously. If they're completely capricious, what good are they?
  - jcranmer 6y ago
    They're not completely capricious. Laws don't operate under the confines of a strict propositional calculus: you don't follow strict axiomatic derivations to a contradiction and declare yourself finished. Instead, it operates generally on a basis that cases with facts in common should have the same decision (hence the name "common law"). And the law is written with this process in mind: if legislators don't like the judicial interpretation of their text, they can change it by changing the law.
    - MegaButts 6y ago
      I get that they can change the law. But instead of changing the law, they gave him a plea deal on the condition he didn't contest it at a higher court. So why not change the law when there's an obvious loophole?
      - ghaff 6y ago
        According to the article, at one point the Wyoming senator did try to get it changed but no one was interested. I expect the answer with this sort of thing is that there are a lot of people in Congress who would roll their eyes and say that they have better things to do than screw around with some weird legal edge case that has basically never actually been a problem. And they're not necessarily wrong.
8732698216 6y ago
> No known felonies have been committed in the Zone of Death since Kalt's discovery. However, a poacher named Michael Belderrain illegally shot an elk in the Montana section of Yellowstone. While that section of the park does have enough residents to form a jury, it might be difficult to put together a standing and fair one due to travel or unwillingness of members of the small population there to serve. A federal judge ruled that Belderrain could be tried in the U.S. District Court for the District of Wyoming, despite the Sixth Amendment problem. Belderrain cited Kalt's paper "The Perfect Crime" to explain why he believed it was illegal to have his trial with a jury from a state other than where the crime was committed. The court dismissed this argument. Belderrain took a plea deal conditioned on him not appealing the Zone of Death issue to the 10th Circuit, and the issue was left unresolved. This (and countless other actions) show how meaningless laws are as anything but an arbitrary threat of force. Governments and other organizations that make laws don't consider themselves bound by them, and why should they? They are institutions of force, not reason. An accusation of hypocrisy does nothing against a gun.
xwdv 6y ago
It's like a real life PVP zone.
paulsutter 6y ago
SpaceX's Starlink means that high speed internet is possible in even this remote area..... Not suggesting any shady services be located there, just sayin'
- FreakyT 6y ago
  Time to commit the unforgivable crime of virtualizing macOS on a non-Mac host!
  - polishdude20 6y ago
    Or pulling off the mattress tag that specifically says it's a crime to do so!
    - marshray 6y ago
      That's why it always says "Except by the consumer." Ripping off the tag is perfectly legal as long as you eat it.
      - polishdude20 6y ago
        Ha!
throwaway-death 6y ago
Zone of Death is a very strange name for it, especially considering there are zero documented cases of death or violence there. I reckon criminal prosecutions have taken many more lives than they have saved. I propose renaming it to Zone of Life.
Apocryphon 6y ago
So if a supervillain was to try to trigger a massive eruption within the Yellowstone Caldera by detonating a weapon inside [0], they could drill to it via the Zone of Death? [0] https://jonnyquest.fandom.com/wiki/The_Edge_of_Yesterday?file=Edge_of_Yesterday_script_page_3.jpg https://jonnyquest.fandom.com/wiki/The_Edge_of_Yesterday?fil...
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  Yes, but a crack team consisting of James Bond, Jason Bourne, Jack Bauer, and Joe Biden could go in and kill the supervillain without any legal repercussions.
sandworm101 6y ago
There is another loophole to this loophole. Yes, there is a requirement that the jury come from people who live in the area, but that does not extend to saying that they have to have been living there at the time of the crime. If push comes to shove, the government can probably arrange to have a sufficient jury pool move into the area prior to jury selection. It would be a comically expensive thing to do but possible.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- schoen 6y ago
  The amendment says > In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law [...] There have been lots of legal disputes about the "impartial" part and the procedures for jury selection (leading to a whole body of custom and caselaw about it). I imagine that would be a contentious angle in your plan, because people who knowingly moved specifically in order to be eligible to serve on a jury for a particular trial might not appear entirely "impartial" in that case. (Of course, I'm not sure which way that issue would go.)
  - sandworm101 6y ago
    That would indeed be a problem. Creating an army base in the area and just dumping a bunch of soldiers would not work. The government would have to "move" people naturally, by perhaps founding a town and incentivizing investment to draw people it. Ludicrously expensive, but possible even within the "speedy trial" timeframe. I would never suggest that a government physically do this. Rather, the possibility would be an argument against the idea that jury trials are impossible per se. A reviewing court would outline some compromised procedure to select a jury, something short of physically getting people to move.
- SahAssar 6y ago
  Wouldn't that be jury tampering?
BurningFrog 6y ago
Surely there are more interesting crimes than murder to use such an area for? One complication is that if you have a permanent crime facility there, like a meth lab, the FBI can just go there and kill you.
- dnautics 6y ago
  How about an unattended online gambling server?
  - BurningFrog 6y ago
    You'll need some very long cables...
    - dnautics 6y ago
      Starlink, solar power
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ceilingcorner 6y ago
I think technical people are fascinated by this zone because we like rules and thus anything that has a unique set of rules is interesting. The reality, though, is that legislation isn’t code, the Constitution is violated all the time, and most legal codes are more like suggestions. While this sounds dystopian, it is probably actually preferable to a state that enforces all of its laws to the letter.
- oso2k 6y ago
  Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes: Rules have never stopped a "bad person" from doing something. Rules aren't made to keep the "bad person out"; they're made to keep the "good people in". I wish I knew who originated it. I can't seem to recall where I heard it now.
SigmundA 6y ago
Ah so that's where the train station is...
nix23 6y ago
So i can kill someone in international waters or on the moon? ...just in america...

96 points by yawz 6y ago

Let's assume a court convicted someone of murder within this zone. Let's also assume the evidence was overwhelming and the act was premeditated because the murderer had knowledge of the Sixth Amendment and this loophole. The case makes it's way to the Supreme Court. But because of the bizarre nature of the loophole SCOTUS simply chooses not to hear appeal and lets the conviction stand. This is how the law could be enforced while technically violating the Sixth Amendment.

littlestymaar 6y ago
If it's premeditated, it has likely been premeditated somewhere else. If so, isn't the premeditation in itself a crime for which you could be prosecuted (in the place where you planned everything).
- jackhalford 6y ago
  So technically the planning and premeditation also needs to be done in the death zone.
- jaywalk 6y ago
  Ummm, no. While premeditation enhances the murder charge and mens rea is a very important legal concept, thoughts are not crimes.
  - MrZongle2 6y ago
    Not yet.
  - anamexis 6y ago
    If they told someone else about it before hand, could it be conspiracy?
  - saluki 6y ago
    Until we have PreCrime.
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  I'm not a lawyer, but I've listened to several podcasts! If you have planned the murder with someone else, that is a conspiracy, which is a serious crime in itself. You don't even need to attempt the murder. If you were just premeditating in your own mind, that is not a crime. Though it might be a factor in sentencing for the actual crime. If the premeditation involves writing down plans with maps etc, then... I haven't listened to that episode yet.
  - lqet 6y ago
    > If the premeditation involves writing down plans with maps etc, then... Just add a preface: "Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental."
eganist 6y ago
> Let's assume a court convicted someone of murder within this zone. Let's also assume the evidence was overwhelming and the act was premeditated because the murderer had knowledge of the Sixth Amendment and this loophole. The case makes it's way to the Supreme Court. But because of the bizarre nature of the loophole SCOTUS simply chooses not to hear appeal and lets the conviction stand. This is how the law could be enforced while technically violating the Sixth Amendment. How would a conviction take place without a jury? Even in the Belderrain case in the Montana section of the park, a jury was never formed; there was only an initial ruling that a trial could move forward despite the risk of partiality, but the case was settled with a plea agreement where the defendant waived any right to pursuing the Zone of Death legal challenge. (can an attorney fact-check me here, by the way? I'm definitely not one)
- tom_mellior 6y ago
  > How would a conviction take place without a jury? I believe the parent's point was that it could take place with a jury from anywhere else, thereby violating the letter of the 6th amendment, but without this having an effect: The convicted person would have to appeal the conviction, but no higher court would decide to hear the appeal. (I'm not a lawyer either, I'm just writing down my understanding of what the parent said.)

ballenf 6y ago

Such a terrible moniker for this swath of land where assembling a jury for a criminal trial would be difficult if not impossible. "Death" is just related to one of the possible crimes that would be problematic to prosecute. But even so, the way plea deals work a defendant would have to be quite idealistic or dumb to go to trial with that as a sole defense. This is the only time in history when a headline like "Yellowstone's one weird trick they don't want you to know" would actually be kind of true.

jetpackjoe 6y ago
In theory, this would never get to trial.
- goodcanadian 6y ago
  In practice, I would be surprised if any court up to and including the Supreme Court would find this loophole an acceptable defense. It could certainly be a long complicated legal battle, but ultimately, I doubt the Supreme Court would find that the intent of the Sixth Amendment was to allow criminals to go free in this situation.
  - lisper 6y ago
    They don't have to find it an acceptable defense, all they would have to do is find that it is not possible to legally try the suspect. Which is in fact the case. But of course they would try him anyway because doing end-runs around the text of the Constitution is standard operating procedure and has been since the founding. Even the whole idea of the Supreme Court having the power to declare laws unconstitutional is found nowhere in the Constitution. That was a power invented by the Supreme Court in Marbury v Madison. There are many other examples. On a strict textual reading of the Constitution, if the second amendment applies to an individual right to bear arms (which is debatable, but that's what the Supreme Court has most recently held) there is no basis for denying individuals the right to have WMDs. There is no basis for making slander and libel crimes under the First Amendment, but we do, and no one argues with it. Likewise, if someone committed murder in the "death zone" they would be tried somewhere and convicted and the Supreme Court would simply refuse to hear the appeal. And that would be that.

DougN7 6y ago

How is this different from a crime that happens in the middle of nowhere somewhere else? There are lots of places with no inhabitants and no courts.

pfarrell 6y ago
IANAL. The loophole purports to originate from the federal juries needing to be made of people from the federal district _and_ state. Presumably, all the sparsely populated places are restricted to a single state and contained in federal court districts large enough to include enough people to assemble a jury.
jandrese 6y ago
This is a little different than for example the deep ocean where nobody has jurisdiction. In this case the Federal Government has jurisdiction, but due to a quirk of the laws would be impossible to prosecute someone for a crime committed there. For the most part it isn't an issue because, as previously noted, nobody lives there. There is nobody around to commit crimes. There is also precious little there to commit crimes against. If this loophole ever actually came up I'd expect it to be over something like illegal logging, not a murder.
ghaff 6y ago
However, if the areas are sparsely inhabited both the federal and the state districts are correspondingly large. You'd never have an entire district that people don't live in even if large areas of the district have no inhabitants or courts. The issue here is that because all of Yellowstone is in the federal district of Wyoming--including the parts that aren't in Wyoming, you'd need someone who lived in the federal district of Wyoming and the state district of Idaho to sit on a jury. That's a null set.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

fasteddie31003 6y ago

This name will be more descriptive when Yellowstone erupts in 1,000's of years in the future.

littlestymaar 6y ago

Depending of what crime you commit, you could still be prosecuted… in another country where the principle of _universal juridiction_[1] applies. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_jurisdiction#Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_jurisdiction#Austral...

squeaky-clean 6y ago
The original paper (reference 6 on the wiki page) also mentions they could still constitutionally get you for a misdemeanor > Another possibility is for prosecutors to concentrate on lesser offenses - those with maximum sentences of six months or less - that do not require a jury trial. Again, these misdemeanors may be lesser charges than the ones to which you would be subject in other districts, but they are better than nothing, they will dissuade some criminals, and, most important, they can be prosecuted constitutionally. And also that if you actually committed a very serious crime, it's very likely you committed some other crime along the way while outside of the "zone of death", conspiracy, firearm violation, or something.
- fedreserved 6y ago
  A year max for murder. I could do that standing on my head

pixelbreaker 6y ago

I've cycled through here when racing Tour Divide (I think it just goes through the bottom of the zone). I should have murdered all the other racers.

pixelbreaker 6y ago
Oh, the route went along Grassy Lake Rd just south of the zone. Shame. Or rather, lucky I didn't execute my plan.

arithmomachist 6y ago

I'm a little surprised no one has fought a duel there.

proverbialbunny 6y ago
Duels are legal in a lot of the US, so not really necessary.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

> A federal judge ruled that Belderrain could be tried in the U.S. District Court for the District of Wyoming, despite the Sixth Amendment problem. Belderrain cited Kalt's paper "The Perfect Crime" to explain why he believed it was illegal to have his trial with a jury from a state other than where the crime was committed. The court dismissed this argument. Judges especially Federal judges are far less impressed by "hacks" and "loopholes" of the system, than most programmers. There is no chance they will let a premeditated murder go unpunished on the basis of some obscure technicality like this.

MegaButts 6y ago
Then why do we even have laws? Seriously. If they're completely capricious, what good are they?
- jcranmer 6y ago
  They're not completely capricious. Laws don't operate under the confines of a strict propositional calculus: you don't follow strict axiomatic derivations to a contradiction and declare yourself finished. Instead, it operates generally on a basis that cases with facts in common should have the same decision (hence the name "common law"). And the law is written with this process in mind: if legislators don't like the judicial interpretation of their text, they can change it by changing the law.
  - MegaButts 6y ago
    I get that they can change the law. But instead of changing the law, they gave him a plea deal on the condition he didn't contest it at a higher court. So why not change the law when there's an obvious loophole?
    - ghaff 6y ago
      According to the article, at one point the Wyoming senator did try to get it changed but no one was interested. I expect the answer with this sort of thing is that there are a lot of people in Congress who would roll their eyes and say that they have better things to do than screw around with some weird legal edge case that has basically never actually been a problem. And they're not necessarily wrong.

8732698216 6y ago

> No known felonies have been committed in the Zone of Death since Kalt's discovery. However, a poacher named Michael Belderrain illegally shot an elk in the Montana section of Yellowstone. While that section of the park does have enough residents to form a jury, it might be difficult to put together a standing and fair one due to travel or unwillingness of members of the small population there to serve. A federal judge ruled that Belderrain could be tried in the U.S. District Court for the District of Wyoming, despite the Sixth Amendment problem. Belderrain cited Kalt's paper "The Perfect Crime" to explain why he believed it was illegal to have his trial with a jury from a state other than where the crime was committed. The court dismissed this argument. Belderrain took a plea deal conditioned on him not appealing the Zone of Death issue to the 10th Circuit, and the issue was left unresolved. This (and countless other actions) show how meaningless laws are as anything but an arbitrary threat of force. Governments and other organizations that make laws don't consider themselves bound by them, and why should they? They are institutions of force, not reason. An accusation of hypocrisy does nothing against a gun.

xwdv 6y ago

It's like a real life PVP zone.

paulsutter 6y ago

SpaceX's Starlink means that high speed internet is possible in even this remote area..... Not suggesting any shady services be located there, just sayin'

FreakyT 6y ago
Time to commit the unforgivable crime of virtualizing macOS on a non-Mac host!
- polishdude20 6y ago
  Or pulling off the mattress tag that specifically says it's a crime to do so!
  - marshray 6y ago
    That's why it always says "Except by the consumer." Ripping off the tag is perfectly legal as long as you eat it.
    - polishdude20 6y ago
      Ha!

throwaway-death 6y ago

Zone of Death is a very strange name for it, especially considering there are zero documented cases of death or violence there. I reckon criminal prosecutions have taken many more lives than they have saved. I propose renaming it to Zone of Life.

Apocryphon 6y ago

So if a supervillain was to try to trigger a massive eruption within the Yellowstone Caldera by detonating a weapon inside [0], they could drill to it via the Zone of Death? [0] https://jonnyquest.fandom.com/wiki/The_Edge_of_Yesterday?file=Edge_of_Yesterday_script_page_3.jpg https://jonnyquest.fandom.com/wiki/The_Edge_of_Yesterday?fil...

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
Yes, but a crack team consisting of James Bond, Jason Bourne, Jack Bauer, and Joe Biden could go in and kill the supervillain without any legal repercussions.

sandworm101 6y ago

There is another loophole to this loophole. Yes, there is a requirement that the jury come from people who live in the area, but that does not extend to saying that they have to have been living there at the time of the crime. If push comes to shove, the government can probably arrange to have a sufficient jury pool move into the area prior to jury selection. It would be a comically expensive thing to do but possible.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
schoen 6y ago
The amendment says > In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law [...] There have been lots of legal disputes about the "impartial" part and the procedures for jury selection (leading to a whole body of custom and caselaw about it). I imagine that would be a contentious angle in your plan, because people who knowingly moved specifically in order to be eligible to serve on a jury for a particular trial might not appear entirely "impartial" in that case. (Of course, I'm not sure which way that issue would go.)
- sandworm101 6y ago
  That would indeed be a problem. Creating an army base in the area and just dumping a bunch of soldiers would not work. The government would have to "move" people naturally, by perhaps founding a town and incentivizing investment to draw people it. Ludicrously expensive, but possible even within the "speedy trial" timeframe. I would never suggest that a government physically do this. Rather, the possibility would be an argument against the idea that jury trials are impossible per se. A reviewing court would outline some compromised procedure to select a jury, something short of physically getting people to move.
SahAssar 6y ago
Wouldn't that be jury tampering?

BurningFrog 6y ago

Surely there are more interesting crimes than murder to use such an area for? One complication is that if you have a permanent crime facility there, like a meth lab, the FBI can just go there and kill you.

dnautics 6y ago
How about an unattended online gambling server?
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  You'll need some very long cables...
  - dnautics 6y ago
    Starlink, solar power

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ceilingcorner 6y ago

I think technical people are fascinated by this zone because we like rules and thus anything that has a unique set of rules is interesting. The reality, though, is that legislation isn’t code, the Constitution is violated all the time, and most legal codes are more like suggestions. While this sounds dystopian, it is probably actually preferable to a state that enforces all of its laws to the letter.

oso2k 6y ago
Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes: Rules have never stopped a "bad person" from doing something. Rules aren't made to keep the "bad person out"; they're made to keep the "good people in". I wish I knew who originated it. I can't seem to recall where I heard it now.

SigmundA 6y ago

Ah so that's where the train station is...

nix23 6y ago

So i can kill someone in international waters or on the moon? ...just in america...