WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday voted to rule on a question left open by its landmark 2020 decision declaring much of eastern Oklahoma to be within an Indian reservation. But the judges rejected a request to consider overturning the decision entirely.
The 2020 decision, McGirt v. Oklahoma, ruled that Native Americans who commit crimes on the reservation, which encompasses much of Tulsa, cannot be prosecuted by state or local law enforcement and must instead face trial in tribal courts. or federal courts.
The question the court agreed to on Friday was whether the same limits apply to non-Indians who commit crimes against Native Americans on reservations.
The case concerns Victor Manuel Castro-Huerta, who was convicted of severe neglect of his 5-year-old stepdaughter, an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, who has cerebral palsy and is legally blind. In 2015, she was found dehydrated, emaciated and covered in lice and feces, weighing just 19 pounds.
Mr. Castro-Huerta, who is not an Indian, was prosecuted by state authorities, convicted in state court and sentenced to 35 years in prison.
Following the McGirt decision, an Oklahoma court of appeals overturned his conviction on the grounds that the crime had taken place in Indian Country. The appeals court based on previous rulings that crimes committed on reservations by or against Indians could not be prosecuted by state authorities.
Federal prosecutors then continued charges against Mr. Castro-Huerta, and he pleaded guilty to child neglect in federal court. He has not yet been convicted.
When asking the Supreme Court to intervene in the case, Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta, No. 21-429, Oklahoma’s Attorney General John M. O’Connor said the judges had “never firmly held that states have no concurrent authority to prosecute non-Indians for state crimes committed against Indians in the Indian country.”
Attorneys for Mr. Castro-Huerta responded that the Supreme Court, lower courts and Congress had all said crimes committed on reservations by or against Indians could not be prosecuted by state authorities.
In his petition for review, Mr. O’Connor asked the Supreme Court to answer two questions: one about the persecution of non-Indians and whether the McGirt decision should be reversed.
In its review order on Friday, the Supreme Court said it would answer only the first question.
Judge Neil M. Gorsuch wrote for the majority in McGirt, which was passed by a vote of 5 to 4, saying the court justified a commitment stemming from an ugly history of forced relocations and broken treaties.
“At the far end of the Trail of Tears lay a promise,” he wrote, along with what was then the four-member liberal wing of the court. “Forced to leave their ancestral lands in Georgia and Alabama, the Creek Nation was assured that their new lands in the West would be safe forever.”
In contradiction, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. predicted. that the decision would cause chaos.
“The state’s ability to prosecute serious crimes will be hampered, and decades of past convictions could very well be thrown away,” he wrote. “In addition, the court has thoroughly destabilized the governance of eastern Oklahoma.”
Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was in the majority, died a few months after the decision was issued. Judge Amy Comey Barrett has since occupied her seat, raising the possibility that the court is open to a review of the ruling.
While urging the judges to do so, Mr. O’Connor wrote that “no recent decision of this court has had a more direct and destabilizing effect on life in a US state than McGirt v. Oklahoma.” It has, he wrote, “put Oklahoma’s criminal justice system in a state of emergency.”
Attorneys for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation told the judges that the state’s account of the aftermath of the McGirt decision was “fiction rather than fact.”
“The United States, the nation and local officials are successfully working together to ensure that a criminal justice crisis does not develop on the reservation,” they wrote.
They added that the state of Oklahoma “confuses the court with a political branch, its decisions can be reversed with the change of seasons.”