JUSTICE IN INDIAN COUNTRY Exploring jurisdictional complexity in a time of transparency

By Measures for Justice

MFJ collects data regarding adult criminal cases filed and resolved in state courts. Through these efforts,
we’ve identified gaps in the types of information received that limit our ability to generate a
comprehensive picture of how criminal cases are processed by trial courts across the United States. One
example of these gaps relates to cases involving American Indians and crimes committed on tribal lands. In an effort to paint a more comprehensive picture of how criminal cases unfold at the local level, MFJ
wanted to better understand jurisdictional authority over these cases.
Unfortunately, we quickly learned that disparate and convoluted laws governing criminal case processing
deeply complicate the question of jurisdictional authority and act as a significant barrier to understanding
the ways in which these cases are processed. A key contributor to this jurisdictional confusion is Public
Law 83-280 (PL-280), which reduces the ability of American Indian tribes to independently respond to
crimes occurring on Indian land, instead allocating authority to state governments to varying degrees across several states.   PL-280 plays a significant role in dictating which institutions respond to criminal offenses and, consequently, what justice looks like for different people across different communities in the United States. The sections that follow shed light on the complexity created by PL-280 and the challenges it poses for data collection and system transparency. Importantly, the intentions of this report are not to make comparisons or draw conclusions about the effectiveness of these differing approaches to justice, but rather to highlight the importance of data transparency and accessibility for the purposes of evaluating system performance and holding administrators accountable. We argue that this transparency is always key to ensure the fair and effective handling of cases, and this is of particular importance in places where the power to handle criminal matters has expanded beyond federal and tribal governments to the state by way of PL-280.

Rochester, NY: Measures for Justice, 2023. 16p.