Tribal Law and Order Act (TLOA)

What happened

Title II of Public Law 111-211, signed July 29, 2010, is the Tribal Law and Order Act. Congress opened it with findings. It found that the United States has "distinct legal, treaty, and trust obligations to provide for the public safety of Indian country," and that a complicated jurisdictional scheme "has a significant negative impact on the ability to provide public safety to Indian communities." It also found that fewer than 3,000 tribal and federal officers patrol more than 56,000,000 acres of Indian country.

The Act's stated purposes include clarifying who is responsible for crimes in Indian country, increasing coordination among federal, state, tribal and local agencies, and empowering tribal governments with the authority, resources and information to provide public safety.

One change was to tribal sentencing power. The Indian Civil Rights Act had limited tribal courts to a one-year, $5,000 penalty for any one offense. The Act amended it so a tribal court may impose up to three years and a $15,000 fine for one offense, and up to nine years total in a case, if the defendant has a prior conviction or is accused of an offense that would carry more than a year under federal or state law.

The longer sentences come with conditions. The tribe must provide effective assistance of counsel, a licensed defense attorney for an indigent defendant at the tribe's expense, a law-trained and licensed judge, public criminal laws and a recording of the proceeding.

Summarized with AI assistance from 4 sources and checked against their words; not yet reviewed by historians or by the nations. Report an error