Judge rejects claim of Indian status

DUCHESNE — An 8th District Court judge has ruled that the state has jurisdiction to prosecute a 19-year-old man for the near-fatal stabbing of another man in 2004, after dismissing a claim that the defendant is a member of a federally-recognized Indian tribe.

In a seven-page ruling, Judge A. Lynn Payne said Jesse Doyle Clark failed to prove that he has a "significant degree of Indian blood" and that he is "recognized as an Indian by a tribe or society of Indians or by the federal government," the two legal requirements set forth in an 1846 U.S. Supreme Court case to establish who may be considered an Indian.

Defense attorney Mike Humiston had sought to have the case against his client dismissed, arguing that Clark is a member of the Uintah Band of Indians and that the alleged offenses occurred on land that remains within the exterior boundaries of the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation.

Clark, who was 16 at the time of the alleged incident, is accused of stabbing another man during a drinking party in October 2004 at the Rock Creek Ranch. He was initially charged as a juvenile, but the case was later transferred to district court where Clark is charged with attempted murder, carrying a concealed dangerous weapon, obstruction of justice, and unlawful consumption of alcohol by a minor.

Humiston said his client is a descendant of an individual who was prevented from enrolling as a member of the Ute Indian Tribe because of the 1954 Ute Partition Act. The act terminated 455 mixed-blood Utes from federal supervision and excluded another 220 individuals from future tribal membership.

Humiston said many of the people terminated or excluded from the Ute Tribe were members of the Uintah Band, which he argued continues to exist as an independent tribe because "federal law presumes that a tribe consists of the majority of its members."

But Payne cited the Utah Supreme Court's decision in State v. Reber — a case he presided over at the trial court level, with Humiston representing the defendant — which held that the Uintah Band was no longer a separate entity once it joined the White River and Uncompahgre bands in 1937 to adopt the Ute Indian Tribe Constitution. That meant that when the UPA was enacted eight years later, "there was no Uintah Band to be expelled from the Ute Tribe," the judge wrote.

Payne added that the language of the UPA specifically states that upon termination, former tribal members no longer enjoy Indian status and are subject to state jurisdiction.