Gates of the Mountains

Getting Away With Murder In Yellowstone?

This year's Law Day theme is "The American Jury: We the People in Action."  So in another installment of the little-known law series, let's focus on a curious paper by Brian Kalt, a law professor at Michigan State, that has made the news recently.  He addresses two constitutional provisions and a statute that could (theoretically) let a person commit a crime in Yellowstone Park with impunity.

Here's the deal.  The Sixth Amendment says:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law . . .

Article III, Section 2 says:

The trial of all crimes, except in cases of impeachment, shall be by jury; and such trial shall be held in the state where the said crimes shall have been committed

Easy enough, right?  A criminal defendant has a right to trial by jury in the state where the crime was committed, and in the judicial district that Congress has defined.  But wait.  Title 16, Section 24 of the U.S. Code says Yellowstone, as a National Park, "shall be under the sole and exclusive jurisdiction of the United States."  And to keep things simple (or so it would seem), Title 28, Section 131 puts all of Yellowstone's federal jurisdiction in one district:

Wyoming and those portions of Yellowstone National Park situated in Montana and Idaho constitute one judicial district.

Now, over to Kalt:

Say that you are in the Idaho portion of Yellowstone, and you decide to spice up your vacation by going on a crime spree. You make some moonshine, you poach some wildlife, you strangle some people and steal their picnic baskets. You are arrested, arraigned in the park, and bound over for trial in Cheyenne, Wyoming before a jury drawn from the Cheyenne area.

But Article III, Section 2 plainly requires that the trial be held in Idaho, the state in which the crime was committed. Perhaps if you fuss convincingly enough about it, the case would be sent to Idaho. But the Sixth Amendment then requires that the jury be from the state (Idaho) and the district (Wyoming) in which the crime was committed. In other words, the jury would have to be drawn from the Idaho portion of Yellowstone National Park, which, according to the 2000 Census, has a population of precisely zero.  (The Montana portion-should you choose to rampage there-has an adult population of a few dozen, which might nevertheless present Sixth Amendment problems as well.)

The result?  "It makes it impossible to satisfy both provisions in the case of the Yellowstone State-Line Strangler.  Assuming that you do not feel like consenting to trial in Cheyenne, you should go free."

Closed: The Front Door to the People's House

It has been decided that Montanans have no need to enter our State Capitol through its main entrance, atop the grand staircase that has just been rebuilt, and so the new logic of post-9/11 security dictates that the front door to the "People's House" remain closed.  (In recent congressional testimony, Justice Kennedy mentioned the planned closure of the front entrance to the United States Supreme Court--the one where generations of lawyers and litigants have entered up the world's most famous courtroom steps under the inscription "Equal Justice Under Law"--again citing security.)

The analysis is incontestable, as far as it goes:  state officials, legislators, employees, lobbyists, tourists, and field-tripping elementary school students can just as easily enter the Capitol through the basement, past the single security guard posted at the information desk.  (To paraphrase a great historian's lament about the passing of Pennsylvania Station, why enter the Capitol up the steps like a god when it is safer now to scuttle in through the basement like a rat?)  Hiring another guard to watch the front door would cost the taxpayers something, and most of the parking is accessed through the back door anyway.

Indeed, it would be cheaper to not have a capitol at all; just lease office space for the Governor, Secretary of State, and Superintendent of Public Instruction, and have the Legislature meet at some hotel conference center for a few months every couple of years.  They've met in humbler quarters.  It would be even cheaper, and probably safer, to have legislators simply make conference calls from their districts for committee and floor sessions.  Whose idea was it anyway to build such a tempting terrorist target, a building full of democratic symbolism ripe for assault?

Let's recall the words of the rascal we have to blame for all this, the man who bought for the Queen City its precarious place as seat of government, and bought himself a senator's seat while he was at it:

“[The Capitol] will stand here like the neighboring mountains for ages to come . . . as a symbol in the minds of every patriotic Montanian of the dignity and grandeur of the state.”

And think also of our first state governor's dedicatory remarks:

"[The Capitol] will be to the state what the homestead is to the citizen, what the fireside is to the family. . . .  Here should repose the honor and conscience of the state by which its citizenship shall be judged and measured and its glory acheived and preserved."

These men helped to build a Capitol as grand and welcoming as the state it crowns.  They topped its dome with Liberty herself, whose torch and shield would provide enough vigilance and security to keep the front doors open after decades marked by fears of radicalism, wartime sedition, and more than a few armed splinter groups.  Why turn temples of democracy into fortresses now?

Welcome to Montana, Corps of Discovery!

"West to a point of small willows on the Stard side, opposite a low white bluff bordering a beautifull rising plain, some woodland below this bluff on the Lard. side, and a thick wooded bottom on the Stard. side.  on this course the river is wide, and crouded with sandbars.  a little below the low bluff on the Lard. side, a timbered bottom commences; here the country rises gradually from the river on the Lard. side"

Thus Meriwether Lewis describes his passage into what is now the State of Montana, 200 years ago today.  Jim tells what else happened.  Thanks to the magic of Google satellite maps, you can see the land Lewis describes here; the river's course has changed some, but you can still see the sandbars, now-cultivated bottoms, low bluffs, and the Yellowstone confluence to the lower right.

The Corps of Discovery would make its first Montana camp tonight, just across the river from the village of Nohly, and spend more than four eventful months in Big Sky Country.  He closes his diary entry for the day with this observation:

"The bald Eagle are more abundant here than I ever observed them in any part of the country."

Fear, Loathing, and $44.95 Bear Spray

According to the WSJ ($), "Bear worries are up in Montana, and even the typically laid-back locals are jumpy." So it's the season to stock up on pricey accessories to help alleviate bear terror:

Sales of Gregory Mountain Products' claw-proof bear bag ($35) are up 7% since 2002, while camping manufacturer Coghlan's has already sold 30,000 units of its new bear bell with magnetic silencer ($2.99) to retailers this year. Pride Johnson, president of Montana-based Counter Assault, says bear pepper spray sales are up 10% over last year. In January, the company will unveil a larger, more powerful 10.2-oz. canister, which sprays at a greater distance and for a longer duration than its 8.1-oz. model ($44.95).

But the best part of the article, written by Heather Won Tesoriero and Jessie Knadler, is hearing that some hikers still don't read the warning label on the bear spray can:

Experts say hikers should learn how to use their weapons before arming themselves. "They spray their tents, their food, even themselves with pepper spray," says Mr. Johnson, who notes that the spray can cause eye and lung irritation. "This stuff is not insect repellent." Tracy Isakson, assistant manager at the Sportsman Ski & Haus sporting good store in Kalispell, Mont. says bells have to be used in combination with sprays. Otherwise, "around here, we call them 'dinner bells,' " he says.

Which reminds me of the joke: How do you tell black bear scat from grizzly bear scat?

Surfing the Glacial Lake Missoula Trail

In the New York Times Jim Robbins reports on the efforts to turn one of our local great floods into a tourist attraction:

Thousands of years ago, with a force that shook the earth, ice dams in the mountains here gave way, sending a towering, churning wall of water - the equivalent of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie flowing at a rate of 10 times all the rivers on the planet - on a frantic dash to the Pacific Ocean. The mammoth lake held back by the dam, Glacial Lake Missoula, was drained like a giant bathtub, in perhaps as little as 48 hours. And like an enormous high-pressure fire hose, the water moved massive amounts of rock and left scars in the bedrock of four states.

(The article contains a nice photo of the faint old lake-bed rings--kind of like residue in a drained bathtub, or foam in an emptied beer glass--on Missoula's Mount Sentinel.)

So legislation has been introduced for an Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail running from Missoula to the Pacific Ocean, the first national trail with a geological theme. One can now imagine a Pleistocene family vacation starting in Glacier National Park and running out to the Columbia Plateau, then along the Columbia to the Pacific. One of the most interesting features along the way are the "Channelled Scablands" (scroll to "Lake Missoula" for the picture), gargantuan channels scraped out of the Eastern Washington landscape by the great floods from Glacial Lake Missoula (similar channels on Mars led to speculation about water there).

Interestingly, the Scablands have been at the center of geology's great debate between uniformitarians (those who believe that slow everyday events dominate geological processes) and catastrophists (those who believe that large scale catastrophes like great floods dominate geological processes), a debate that also has attracted some creationists. The Grand Canyon & Glacier Park (slowly carved by water and ice) on one hand, and the Scablands (quickly scoured by floodwaters) reveal the truth in both approaches.

But the real scoop of the Ice Age Trail story is that the legislation actually proposes this Congressional finding:

(a) Findings- Congress finds the following:

(1) At the end of the last Ice Age, some 12,000 to 17,000 years ago, a series of cataclysmic floods occurred in what is now the northwest region of the United States, leaving a lasting mark of dramatic and distinguishing features on the landscape of parts of Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon.

Always good to see our elected officials doing their geology. I wonder if there will be a heated floor debate over this?

Sorry, Wrong Gates.

It's been hard to catch an extra minute recently--so much has been happening around here and in blogdom that we haven't had a chance to post, let alone update the Montana Blogmap. We'll get to it soon.

But a funny thing happened last night. We received an e-mail on our blog address titled "Refund of Deposit". I read it a couple of times trying to figure out just what sort of spam scam it involved: something about paying $150 for a tour boat, but none of the usual promises of untold Nigerian riches, and what was it about this tour boat anyway?

Eventually, it became clear: someone had mistaken us for the folks who offer those scenic boat tours on the Missouri through the you-know-what. Apparently, our blog now takes first place in a "Gates of the Mountains" google, but I still can't imagine how someone would confuse our ramblings about trips and food and "blogging" (whatever that is) for a tour boat company. (Call off the trademark lawyers!)

Let's get this straight:

Helena bloggers: http://gatesofthemountains.blogs.com/

Missouri boat tours: http://www.gatesofthemountains.com/

That reminds us--one of these days we need to take one of those boat tours ourselves. They sound gorgeous!

Mega-tsunami: Another reason to live in Montana

Geologists have a way of grabbing the spotlight now and then with chronic catastrophic threats, something fun for people who labor in a world where most of the action is measured in inches over millions of years. The disaster stories seem to bubble up into the news during slow science news cycles, then dissolve into the dusty pantheon of "sky-is-falling" threats because really what could you do about Yellowstone blowing its top anyway?

But this geological threat from the apparently idyllic Canary Islands sounds more imminent than most:

Geologists are concerned that an unstable flank of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the island of La Palma in the Canaries is in danger of sliding into the sea.

If shaken loose by a volcanic eruption, the slab of rock - which is the size of the Isle of Man - would send a tsunami more than 500ft high racing across the Atlantic at the speed of a jumbo jet.

Within three hours, the wave would swamp the east coast of Africa, within five hours it would reach southern England and within 12 it would hit America's east coast. I wonder why?

New York, Washington, Boston and Miami would be hit by successive waves abound 60ft high. Tens of millions of people could die.

Although the volcano could erupt any day - it has been dormant since 1971 but tends to erupt every 20 to 200 years - funding to British scientists investigating the threat has been stopped.

That last quip about funding probably explains why this story is surfacing now--even geologists need to send their kids to college--but there's little mention of this so far in the US press.

Gulch Guides

We missed a lot of activity on the blog front while we were away, and we're working on catching up.

Thanks to one of Kinja's regular hiccups, in which it reposts several old entries from the same blog, I discovered that our friend and expat Helenan Will is launching a new project with his girlfriend Jen. We discovered them during their journeys in Spain as we prepared to follow in their tracks, and now they are building on their wanderlust reporting with "Gulch Guides for the Good Life":

Our blogs get a lot of search engine hits from people looking for places to eat, drink, or sleep. This site grew out the idea of letting people know where to find great places for cold beers or a tasty food without making them read through all of our rambling prose.

The places and things listed on the Gulch Guides are our favorites from our travels and current lives. Our recommendations come straight from our own skewed perspectives. Everything we list on the site is highly recommended – no need to look for the four stars or the thumbs up – everything here is our favorite. Being thrifty, budget travelers all restaurants we write about are under $10 USD and all bars serve beer.

Will and Jen have a talent for finding and capturing the kinds of colorful local places that deserve more attention, and blogging is a natural way to spotlight them. By the way, this is something we've tried to do in fits and starts, starting with our early posts about food and drink, and we have several more posts like that sitting on the shelf. We'll now look to the Gulch Guides for inspiration.

Grizzlies Among Us

John Fialka in the WSJ ($) reports that, just over the divide from here near Seeley Lake, an unlikely creature is learning the lessons of the town deer and the skunk that's been fumigating our neighborhood recently:

America's largest, smartest predators may be closer than many people think.

For years, retired forester Bud Moore, along with many of the other 900 residents of the lush Swan Valley, believed that grizzly bears spent spring and fall in the valley and summers up in the mountains eating huckleberries. Then he saw the maps showing that the bears while away the summers in the valley, bedding down near humans.

One female grizzly spent the last couple of summers nestling in the woods just behind Mr. Moore's house. That might upset some people, but not him. "For me, living anywhere else is just kind of a watered-down experience," says Mr. Moore, 86 years old. "Those bears are big enough to keep your adrenaline up. You are just a little more alive than you would be."

Over the past decade, this area's human population has increased 20%. To Mr. Servheen, the bear-tracking maps suggest that grizzlies are responding by doing what deer, coyotes, wolves, cougars and the smaller, less dangerous black bears do where human habitation and nature converge. They are learning to live among people while keeping a lower profile. Increasingly, grizzlies are doing most of their feeding and socializing at night.

We're not quite as cool as Bud Moore is about bears--actually we're total ursuphobes but we plan to work on that through some backcountry therapy--but it sounds encouraging that humans and bears are both making compromises toward a relatively peaceful coexistence on the fringes of the wild areas they share.

Hot Granada

We´re halfway through the honeymoon, and sheltering from the heat in an internet cafe beneath the Alhambra, amidst signs with pomegranates (granadas) all over town.

We continue to take lots of notes on things we see and eat and drink here, and will post a few when we´re not being charged by minute (with bad exchange rates and all). Back soon!