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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.
by 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 agoIANAL. 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 agoThis 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 agoHowever, 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.