Monday, January 30, 2012

Where In the United States You Can Get Away With Murder

This is a pretty fun and easy to read Law Review article. See The Perfect Crime available for download here .

Say that you are in the Idaho portion of Yellowstone and you decide to spice up your vacation by going on a crime spree," Kalt writes in a forthcoming paper for the Georgetown Law Journal. "You make some , the state in which the crime was committed. "Perhaps if you fuss convincingly enough about it the case would be sent to Idaho. "But the Sixth Amendment then requires that the jury be fmoonshine, you poach some wildlife, you strangle some people and steal their picnic baskets."You are arrested, arraigned in the park and bound over for trial in Cheyenne, Wyoming, before a jury drawn from the Cheyenne area. "But Article III [Section 2] plainly requires that the trial be held in Idahorom the state - Idaho - and the district - Wyoming - in which the crime was committed. "In other words, the jury would have to be drawn from the Idaho portion of Yellowstone which, according to the 2000 Census has a population of precisely zero. "Assuming that you do not feel like consenting to trial in Cheyenne, you should go free."

Now this Law Review article is from 2005 and got some press coverage even on the BBC. However from my research it appears that this problem has not been corrected strangely.

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