U.S. Attorney Scott Matheson urged a federal judge not to release 18 convicted felons - including two murderers - from federal prison even though they were wrongfully tried in federal court.
Releasing the 18 Indians could be a real problem for the criminal justice system and would have tremendous impact on the Uintah Basin, Matheson told U.S. District Judge David Sam Tuesday. The judge would be releasing "numerous violent criminals" into society, he said.Most of the 18 are murderers, rapists and child sexual abusers.
The Indians were tried and convicted in federal court because prosecutors and judges believed the location of their crimes was on the Uintah-Ouray Reservation. However, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in February that much of the Uintah-Ouray Reservation was actually state land and had been since 1905.
Hence, the 18 should have been released, and, if necessary, retried with state crimes and tried in state courts, argued Manny Garcia, attorney for Kim Cuch, one of the 18.
Cuch has filed a motion to have his guilty plea overturned and to be released from prison. He was sentenced to 70 months in a federal penitentiary after pleading guilty to sexual abuse of a child, a crime that occurred in Roosevelt. He has served two years of his sentence.
If Sam grants that motion, the remaining five Utah federal judges would have to grant similar motions from the remaining 17 Indians.
Matheson urged Sam to deny the motion. Releasing those men "presents an enormous practical problem in both state and federal courts," Matheson said. The claim that the state could simply charge the men with state crimes and retry them is simplistic, he said. "That is more theory than practicality."
Garcia disagreed with Matheson's characterization.
"This is not a situation where you will open the floodgates and release thousands of people, or even hundreds, or even tens. It's eighteen. So it's not that big a problem."
Utah's state and federal courts misunderstood the law, but these 18 men shouldn't be punished for that misunderstanding, he said. The court has ruled that the land always was state land. The ruling doesn't make a new designation of the land. It simply returns to an old, and right status that was widely accepted in the state for more than 50 years, Garcia said.
"Now that we know what the law is, we must follow it," he said.
U.S. Magistrate Ronald Boyce has recommended that Sam release Cuch and all others. Under the Supreme Court ruling, the federal government had no authority to try these men in the first place, Boyce said.
The "fact is no federal crime was ever committed, and there is a complete absence of any federal jurisdiction," he wrote in his 22-page report.
But Matheson wants Sam and other judges to take this position: The Supreme Court ruling was meant to apply to all present and future cases. It does not apply to past cases.
The high court didn't say one way or another whether its ruling was retroactive. "We might be better off today if it had," Matheson said.
Some of the crimes are 15 years old, he said. Retrying the criminals would be difficult because of lost evidence, faded memories, and the loss of victims and witnesses.
Retrying the cases would be a tremendous drain on the state's criminal justice system, he said. It would also traumatize victims and witnesses.
Matheson relied heavily on a 1973 Supreme Court ruling in arguing that the ruling should not be retroactive. In the 1976 case, the Supreme Court ruled that even though it had earlier ruled that military tribunals had no jurisdiction over non-military crimes committed by servicemen, thousands of past courts-martial were still valid.
The same situation exists here, Matheson said.
Jurisdiction of much of the reservation has been debated for the past 20 years. U.S. District Judge Willis Ritter issued an injunction in 1976 barring the state from prosecuting crimes committed by Indians on federal land. Jenkins ruled in 1981 that the land was federal land and issued a similar
injunction. Sam took the matter under advisement.