The Sale In Myton

An enrolled tribal member was charged in a Utah state court with distributing a controlled substance in a small town inside the original boundaries of a reservation, on land Congress had opened to non-Indian settlement. He pleaded guilty, then moved to withdraw the plea, arguing that the town was still 'Indian country', where the state had no criminal jurisdiction over Indians. An intermediate appeals court agreed and vacated his conviction, but the state's highest court reinstated it. The state argued that the acts opening the land, one of which restored unallotted lands 'to the public domain', had shrunk the reservation. The defence argued Congress had never clearly diminished it.