Yellowstone’s Zone of Death

Yellowstone National Park lies mostly in Wyoming, but narrow slivers spill into Montana and Idaho. In 2005 law professor Brian Kalt pointed out something odd about the Idaho slice. The entire park falls under the federal District of Wyoming, and the Sixth Amendment guarantees a jury drawn from both the state and the district where a crime was committed. In the roughly 50 square miles of Yellowstone inside Idaho, those two conditions describe a place where nobody lives, so, Kalt argued, no constitutional jury could ever be seated.

Kalt's paper, 'The Perfect Crime,' published in The Georgetown Law Journal, gave the strip its nickname, the Zone of Death. He stressed that he was pointing out a gap that needed closing, not a license to break the law, and proposed that Congress simply move the strip into the District of Idaho. Congress has never acted. The argument has reached court only indirectly, when an elk poacher in the park's Montana section cited it and then took a plea deal, so the loophole remains untested.

• Idaho
  The Gem State, a rugged northern Rockies landscape located in
• Yellowstone National Park
  The world's first national park, atop a supervolcano part of
• Montana
  Big Sky Country, where the plains meet the Rockies related
• Wyoming
  The least populous state, high plains and the Rockies related