This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Attorneys in three Utah counties are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a decision from the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in a decades-old boundary dispute between the counties and the Ute Indian Tribe.
The petition was filed last month on behalf of Duchesne, Uintah and Wasatch counties in response to a summer ruling from the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, which said that Utah prosecutors have no business going after Ute tribal members who commit crimes on Indian land.
Attorneys for the counties want the U.S. Supreme Court to settle once and for all who has jurisdiction over certain tribal lands in Utah, putting an end to a complex 40-year boundary dispute. They say that the current conflicting rulings from the Denver appeals court and the U.S. District Court has created an "intolerable" conflict, which has made it nearly impossible to tell who has jurisdiction over which land unless a title search is done.
"The Reservation's boundaries are in chaos," attorneys for Wasatch County wrote in the petition filed in November.
The current high court rulings have created a "checkerboard of jurisdictional responsibilities," the attorneys argue in the petition, but they say "no one even knows ahead of time where the squares of the checkerboard lie and who has jurisdiction."
"Actually, it is much worse than a checkerboard without squares," attorneys wrote. "It is an impossible-to-play game of three-dimensional chess because the court systems apply conflicting jurisdictional rules and Tenth Circuit precedent applies to some parts but not others. So county residents have no way to know … whether they are bound to the Tribe's laws or instead Utah law."
The boundary dispute is rooted in a lawsuit filed nearly 40 years ago by the Utah Tribe against the state of Utah and several local governments.
In that case, the 10th Circuit Court found the tribe retained jurisdiction over three regions in dispute: the Uncompahgre Reservation, the Uintah Valley Reservation and some national forest areas.
The state and local governments appealed, but when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case, "that should have been the end of the matter," Judge Neil Gorsuch wrote in the 10th Circuit Court's June ruling.
It wasn't. Instead, state officials began prosecuting tribal members for alleged crimes within the tribal boundaries set by the 10th Circuit, setting off more litigation. Eventually, the 10th Circuit Court said one of the three contested areas — the Uintah Valley Reservation — was no longer under tribal jurisdiction.
"Naturally, the state wanted more," Gorsuch wrote. "It asked this court to extend [that] reasoning to the national forest and Uncompahgre lands."
The 10th Circuit Court refused, but the local governments once again began prosecuting tribal members for alleged crimes inside those boundaries, Gorsuch wrote.
Tribal member Lesa Jenkins, for example, was charged in Wasatch County Justice Court for alleged traffic offenses in a national forest area where the 10th Circuit Court said the tribe had jurisdiction.
The tribe sued the state, Wasatch County and various officials; then the state, Uintah and Duchesne counties sued the tribe.
In resolving the competing claims, the 10th Circuit Court sided solidly with the tribe and warned the local governments against challenging the tribal boundaries again.
"The time has come to respect the peace and repose promised by settled decisions," the opinion reads. "In the event our hope proves misplaced and the defendants persist in failing to respect the [previous] rulings ... they may expect to meet with sanctions in the district court or in this one."
The U.S. Supreme Court is asked to review about 10,000 cases per year, but agree to hear oral arguments in only about 100 cases, according to its website.