Beware the Zone of Death!

Before you finalize your vacation plans, you might want make sure you don't go camping in the Idaho portion of Yellowstone National Park. You see, that 50 square mile patch of wilderness, is, in addition to being completely uninhabited, completely lawless, according to Michigan State law prof Brian Kalt. In a law review article a couple of years ago, Kalt argued that you could perpetrate the "perfect crime" there and escape criminal punishment - the Zone of Death. How could that be? It's a little complicated, but basically it goes like this:

Under both the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, defendants charged with federal crimes have a right to be tried by a jury of their peers drawn from the state and district in which the crime was committed. So, if you sell drugs in Charleston, you have a right to be tried in West Virginia and, specifically, in the Southern District of WV. Yellowstone is all federal property, with the federal government responsible for law enforcement there. Most of Yellowstone (over 3 million square miles) is in Wyoming, but small bits overflow into Idaho (50 square miles) and Montana (260 square miles). When those states and their accompanying federal district courts were created, the District of Wyoming was defined to include all of Yellowstone, even the part that flows over into other states.

Therein lies the rub. If you commit an offense in the Wyoming portion of Yellowstone, you could be prosecuted in accordance with the Constitution in Wyoming. But if you committed your offense in the Idaho portion, it's impossible to try you both in the state (Idaho) and district (Wyoming) where the crime was committed. Since there are no people in that portion of the park, there's no pool from which to draw a jury (the small population of the Montana portion probably could work, if needed).

Would it really work? Who knows - Kalt deals with the potential work arounds and shoots them down pretty effectively. Given that - you'd expect that Congress would jump at the chance to fix the problem, right?

Not quite. As this follow up article shows, Kalt's attempts to get a Congressional fix fell on deaf ears. He did, however, manage to draw the attention of the National Enquirer and a best-selling author, who used the Zone of Death as a plot device in one of his books. Someone even got prosecuted in the Montana area - for illegally shooting elk - and used Kalt's argument, but the district judge shot it down summarily and a subsequent guilty plea squelched any chances of the circuit court taking up the issue.

So, beware if you're hiking the wilds of Yellowstone. You might be the perfect target!