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Cake day: June 11th, 2024

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  • Soo… Your answer for the Native American women being murdered is just to sit by and wait for a justice system that is emphatic about refusing to investigate these crimes? You’re essentially telling these people to have complete faith in a system that has shown great interest in letting them die.

    https://northernkentuckylawreview.com/blog/the-legal-loophole-affecting-native-nationsnbsp

    There are approximately 326 federal Indian reservations located in the United States. [i] The violence on these reservations is estimated to be up to ten times higher than national averages. [ii] Specifically, the violence against women and children is astounding. A study completed by the National Institute of Justice found eighty-four percent of native women have experienced some type of violence within their lifetime, with fifty-six percent having suffered sexual violence. [iii] Nevertheless, the prosecution statistics for these crimes do not even begin to measure up.

    Confusion in jurisdiction, lack of funds, and overall disinterest in the pursuit of the crimes and seeking justice for native victims produced an epidemic of violence on reservations. [viii] In Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta, the United States Supreme Court concluded that the federal government and the state in which a crime is committed have concurrent jurisdiction to prosecute crimes committed by non-Indians against Indians on Indian land. [ix] The state and federal departments tasked with prosecuting these crimes are funded by tax dollars, which Indians do not pay. [x]

    A landmark case in this discussion is Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, because the U.S. Supreme Court held that non-Indians, even if residents of a reservation, could not be prosecuted by tribal courts for criminal conduct. [xi] Essentially, tribal councils only maintain jurisdiction over Indians whom commit a crime on reservation land. [xii] This allows for non-Indians to commit crimes on reservations with little fear of repercussions. [xiii]

    Non-Indians have exploited this legal loophole because they are aware of the unlikelihood of prosecution by the federal government. In 2011, only one year after the Tribal Law and Order Act was signed into law, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University recovered data that revealed federal prosecutors declined to file charges in fifty-two percent of cases involving serious crimes on Native American reservations. [xiv]