Facts
- Billy Jo Lara, an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, was not a member of the Spirit Lake Sioux Tribe.
- Spirit Lake tribal authorities issued an exclusion order barring Lara from the Spirit Lake Reservation.
- Lara returned to the reservation in defiance of the order and was arrested by a Bureau of Indian Affairs officer working with the tribe.
- During the arrest, Lara struck the officer.
- Lara pleaded guilty in Spirit Lake Tribal Court to a tribal offense (“violence to a policeman”) based on the same incident.
- The United States then indicted Lara in federal court for assaulting a federal officer under 18 U.S.C. § 111.
- Lara moved to dismiss the federal indictment under the Double Jeopardy Clause, arguing the tribal conviction barred a second prosecution for the same conduct.
Issues
- Whether Congress has constitutional authority to authorize tribes to exercise criminal jurisdiction over nonmember Indians by recognizing and affirming that power in 25 U.S.C. § 1301(2).
- Whether, after a tribal prosecution of a nonmember Indian under § 1301(2), the Double Jeopardy Clause bars a subsequent federal prosecution based on the same conduct, or whether the dual-sovereignty doctrine permits both prosecutions.
Decision
- The Supreme Court reversed the en banc Eighth Circuit.
- The Court held that Congress has constitutional authority to relax federal-law restrictions on tribes’ inherent powers of self-government, including criminal jurisdiction over nonmember Indians.
- The Court construed 25 U.S.C. § 1301(2) as recognizing and affirming inherent tribal authority to prosecute “all Indians,” not delegating federal prosecutorial power to tribes.
- Because the tribal prosecution was an exercise of tribal sovereignty and the federal prosecution was an exercise of federal sovereignty, the Double Jeopardy Clause did not bar the federal § 111 prosecution.
Legal Principles
- Congress, exercising its Indian affairs powers, may alter federal-law limits on the exercise of tribal self-government and may recognize and affirm tribes’ inherent criminal jurisdiction over nonmember Indians.
- A tribal prosecution undertaken pursuant to recognized inherent tribal authority is attributable to the tribe as a separate sovereign, not to the federal government as delegator.
- Under the dual-sovereignty doctrine, successive prosecutions by a tribe (acting as a sovereign) and the United States for offenses arising from the same conduct do not violate the Double Jeopardy Clause.
- The double-jeopardy analysis turns on the source of prosecutorial authority (separate sovereigns versus the same sovereign), not on factual overlap or similarity of offense elements.
Conclusion
The Court upheld Congress’s authority to recognize and affirm tribes’ inherent criminal jurisdiction over nonmember Indians and held that a federal prosecution after a tribal conviction for the same conduct is permitted because the tribe and the United States prosecute as separate sovereigns.