"Consider last year’s testimony from Drew Wrigley, Tom Heffelfinger, and others on the reasons why Indian Country U.S. Attorney’s Offices are forced to decline to prosecute most Indian Country crimes.

Several points:

* AUSAs decline many Indian Country cases because of the difficulty in proving additional elements of Indian identity and Indian Country status. Additional resources won’t improve that much.
* AUSAs decline many cases because they don’t meet statutory requirements like the extent of serious injury in assault cases.
* AUSAs decline cases because of the time and distance required to secure evidence needed to convict. Resources could help, but we believe they would have be sufficient to actually house a federal law enforcement agency on the doorsteps of every reservation to be effective.
* According to Drew Wrigley, “The issue of resources is never a basis for a declination of a case in North Dakota, but violent Indian crime cases, we never decline any cases for resources.” If so (something Tom Heffelfinger rebutted somewhat), then more federal resources seems an unusual solution.
* Nothing in the federal project does much to reduce the epidemic of violent crime against Indian women. Like Sen. Dorgan’s Tribal Law and Order Act, we think AG Holder’s initiative will focus on drugs, immigration, and the like. And that’s what the DOJ is best at doing, not violent person-to-person on-reservation cime. Hopefully, tribal leaders will point the government to other serious crime problems. We’ll see.

Frankly, the real solution is tribal criminal jurisdiction. Once federal and state policymakers quit focusing on irrelevancies like the qualifications of tribal judges and the difficulty in finding tribal law or civil rights protections — all of which can be solved by recourse to the habeas remedy in the Indian Civil Rights Act — then we’ll see a real reduction in Indian Country crime."

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Bolstering Federal Law Enforcement in Indian Country Nice, but Misplaced (Turtle Talk 8/20)