CA10: State officers investigating murder on an Indian reservation without jurisdiction does not lead to suppression of evidence

State law enforcement officers investigated a murder on the Muscogee Creek Reservation which at the time was not necessarily legal but two years later was not. The murder was prosecuted in federal court. There is no dispute the officers lacked jurisdiction. The exclusionary rule will not be applied because the officers did nothing constitutionally wrong. United States v. Little, 2024 U.S. App. LEXIS 25639 (10th Cir. Oct. 11, 2024) (After all, the bottom line is “reasonableness,” and it can’t be said this was unreasonable.):

This case presents an issue generated by the sea change in criminal investigation and prosecution that was initiated by the Supreme Court’s decision in McGirt v. Oklahoma, 591 U.S. 894 (2020). Defendant Justin Little was investigated and arrested by state police in Oklahoma in April 2018 after his wife’s boyfriend was shot and killed on the Muscogee Creek Reservation. Under the Supreme Court’s holding two years later in McGirt that the Creek Reservation had not been disestablished, state police lacked jurisdiction over Little’s offense when they investigated him. No one disputes the fact that the state of Oklahoma lacked jurisdiction over this offense. Little was convicted of first-degree murder in federal court. The issue before us is only whether the evidence previously collected by state officers who it turned out lacked jurisdiction could be used in the federal prosecution against Little.

We hold that such evidence was admissible against Little under the good faith exception to the Fourth Amendment’s exclusionary rule. As previously explained by this court, the Creek, the federal government, and the State of Oklahoma all believed for at least a century before and during the investigation in this case that Oklahoma had jurisdiction over offenses committed on Creek land after Oklahoma became a state. While we held in 2017, in Murphy v. Royal, 875 F.3d 896 (10th Cir. 2017), aff’d sub nom. Sharp v. Murphy, 591 U.S. 977 (2020), that the Creek Reservation had not been disestablished and therefore the State of Oklahoma lacked jurisdiction over offenses committed on the Reservation, likely because that decision was so novel and impactful, we stayed the mandate in that case pending Supreme Court review. See id. at 966. The context surrounding our decision to stay the mandate could reasonably have been interpreted by Oklahoma law enforcement officers as indicating that they could continue investigating offenses on Creek land pending Supreme Court review. Specifically, the motion to stay the mandate in Murphy argued that without a stay, Oklahoma would have to immediately cease investigating offenses on Creek land, and the federal government would have to fill that law enforcement void overnight. Oklahoma’s state law enforcement and judicial system continued to operate after Murphy under the assumption that it still had jurisdiction over such offenses. Under these unique circumstances, we conclude that exclusion of the evidence collected through the state investigation of Little is unwarranted—state officers’ conduct was not sufficiently deliberate or culpable to suggest that exclusion would have a significant deterrent effect, and any deterrent effect is heavily outweighed by the social costs of exclusion—the loss of evidence generated in good faith by state officers in Oklahoma between our Murphy decision in 2017 and the Supreme Court’s McGirt decision in 2020.