We Enjoy Watching Movies,

and many have a murder somewhere in the plot,

but it is always the same, how do you commit the perfect murder? well it appears thanks to the inactivity of the US Congress, that due to geography you can commit murder on US soil, admit it and even boast about, and the authorities can do nothing, even though this glaring hole in the system had been pointed out to congress, the loophole has not been closed, so here is how you can commit the perfect murder, invite your victim to Yellowstone National Park, but chose a very specific area of it, because of the way that the vast park geographically covers three US states, but only one of them has legal jurisdiction over all of it, getting a murderer on trial would be virtually impossible, here is why, like all national parks, Yellowstone is federal land, and it is also the only federal court district in the United States that crosses state lines. The bulk of it is in Wyoming, but small portions fall in Idaho and Montana, that doesn’t mean very much to the average person, but Article III of the United States Constitution requires federal criminal trials to be held in the state in which the crime was committed, but according to the Sixth Amendment, a criminal defendant has the right to a trial by jurors living in the state and district where the crime was committed. So what happens when the crime is committed in the 50-square-mile uninhabited area of the park located in Idaho? It would be impossible to form a jury,

Brian Kalt, a law professor at Michigan State University, discovered the judicial no-man’s land in 2004, while looking for interesting material for an article, convinced that he had gone over all the details and that his arguments made sense, He decided to write an article about the Yellowstone Zone of Death. There was one problem though – he feared that someone might read it, take the person they most disliked to Yellowstone and actually kill them there. So before publishing his paper, he sends copies of it to the Department of Justice, the US attorney in Wyoming, and the House and Senate judiciary committees, hoping that they would close the loophole, making his article a simple “what might have been” story, fixing the judicial problem would have been easy, and Kalt as a lawyer even drafted legislation language in his letters. It was three lines long and it simply suggested dividing Yellowstone into three federal districts, with each of the states getting jurisdiction of the portions that fell on their land. Shockingly, to this day, no one has done anything about this problem, contacted by VICE about the Zone of Death, a couple of senators offered different explanations for the lack of action from Congress. The press secretary of Wyoming senator Michael Enzi said that after studying the problem, Enzi found that “there does not seem to be a simple legislative fix,” while Idaho senator Jim Risch claims that the whole issue is pure “science fiction”, and if a murder were to happen in this uninhibited area of his state, Idaho would have jurisdiction, despite the statute clearly placing Yellowstone National Park under the “sole and exclusive jurisdiction of the United States.” so if you are having a feud with relatives, friends or neighbours and someone suggest burying the hatchet and have a picnic in Yellowstone Park, you might want to decline the offer!