Indian territory again? An old Oklahoma murder case spotlights tribal sovereignty
Set beside a gravel county road, the painted cross stands chest-high in a small circle of bricks, brushed by tall grass and black-eyed Susans and daisies. The lettering on the pockmarked crossbar is faded but still legible: George Jacobs.
This lonely roadside ditch is where Mr. Jacobs died one night in August 1999 after being stabbed and beaten by Patrick Murphy. That same night, Mr. Murphy confessed to the assault on his girlfriend’s former partner and the father of her child. He was arrested and tried and convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death.
Murphy’s appeal took a while, as capital cases do, and his defenders tried to stay the verdict on grounds of mental incompetency as well as faulty trial procedures and execution protocols in Oklahoma. None seemed to get much traction, but one detail in the case stood out: the location of the crime.
Murphy is Native American, a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, the fourth-largest tribe in the United States. So was Jacobs. And the ditch where he bled to death is private land that belonged, in part, to a Creek Indian, potentially placing the crime scene in Indian country, as defined by US law. If so, Murphy should never have been tried in state court. Instead, his crime was a matter for federal prosecutors, who in major criminal cases act in concert with tribal authorities.
Last year, a federal appeals court ruled in Murphy’s favor, upholding his claim that Oklahoma didn’t have jurisdiction to try him. And if it didn’t have jurisdiction, it couldn’t execute him.
Had the court’s ruling applied only to crimes committed on similar small patches of land owned by individual Indians or the tribe, it might have gone largely unnoticed. The reason is that 96 percent of the Creek’s original territory – a land mass set aside in the late 1800s – is now in non-Indian hands.
But what the 10th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled went much further. Not only did
