McGirt v. Oklahoma

McGirt v. Oklahoma
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued May 11, 2020 Decided July 9, 2020
Full case name	Jimcy McGirt, Petitioner, v. Oklahoma
Docket no.	18-9526
Citations	591 U.S. ___ (more) 140 S. Ct. 2452 207 L. Ed. 2d 985
Case history
Prior	Denial for relief, PC-2018-1057 (Okla. Crim. App. Feb. 25) (2019); Cert. granted, 140 S. Ct. 659 (2019)
Holding
For Major Crimes Act purposes, land reserved for the Creek Nation since the 19th century remains "Indian country".
Court membership
Chief Justice John Roberts Associate Justices Clarence Thomas · Ruth Bader Ginsburg Stephen Breyer · Samuel Alito Sonia Sotomayor · Elena Kagan Neil Gorsuch · Brett Kavanaugh
Case opinions
Majority	Gorsuch, joined by Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan
Dissent	Roberts, joined by Alito, Kavanaugh; Thomas (except footnote 9)
Dissent	Thomas
Laws applied
Oklahoma Enabling Act Major Crimes Act

McGirt v. Oklahoma, 591 U.S. ___ (2020), was a landmark^[1][2] United States Supreme Court case which held that the domain reserved for the Muscogee Nation by Congress in the 19th century has never been disestablished and constitutes Indian country for the purposes of the Major Crimes Act, meaning that the State of Oklahoma has no right to prosecute American Indians for crimes allegedly committed therein. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals applied the McGirt rationale to rule nine other Indigenous nations had not been disestablished. As a result, almost the entirety of the eastern half of what is now the State of Oklahoma remains Indian country, meaning that criminal prosecutions of Native Americans for offenses therein falls outside the jurisdiction of Oklahoma’s court system. In these cases, jurisdiction properly vests within the Indigenous judicial systems and the federal district courts under the Major Crimes Act.

In the immediate wake of McGirt, Oklahoma courts began reviewing past criminal cases involving Native Americans, vacating past convictions, and transferring the matters to the federal courts for criminal prosecution. However, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals effectively ended this practice by issuing a controversial ruling that McGirt was not retroactive less than a year after the Supreme Court’s decision.^[3][4] Consistent with McGirt, this initially included crimes perpetrated against American Indian victims by defendants who were not. However, in 2022, the Supreme Court decided the case of Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta and held that state courts have concurrent jurisdiction with federal courts over crimes allegedly committed within Indian country against victims who are American Indians by those defendants who are not.

McGirt was related to Sharp v. Murphy, 591 U.S. ___ (2020), heard in the 2018–19 term on the same question but which was believed to be deadlocked due to Justice Neil Gorsuch's recusal; Gorsuch recused because he had prior judicial oversight of the case. Sharp was decided per curiam alongside McGirt.