Inside Someone Else's Line

On a routine patrol in a Central American country's territorial waters, the U.S. Coast Guard spotted a wooden fishing vessel running without lights or a flag. It alerted that country's naval service, whose navy chased the boat. The occupants abandoned it and fled into the jungle. The next morning, searchers found about 760 kilograms of cocaine on board. Local authorities arrested four men on the beach and in the jungle nearby, and the country's foreign ministry consented to their prosecution in the United States. Charged under a U.S. law against drug trafficking on vessels, the men entered conditional guilty pleas that preserved one argument: that Congress had no constitutional power to punish their conduct in another nation's territorial waters.