Document ID: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca9-17-30022/USCOURTS-ca9-17-30022-1/pdf.json

Parties Involved:
Joshua James Cooley
Appellee
United States of America
Appellant

Document Text:

FOR PUBLICATION

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS

FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,

Plaintiff-Appellant,

v.

JOSHUA JAMES COOLEY,

Defendant-Appellee.

No. 17-30022

D.C. No.

1:16-cr-00042-

SPW-1

ORDER

Filed January 24, 2020

Before: Marsha S. Berzon, Stephanie Dawn Thacker,

*

and Andrew D. Hurwitz, Circuit Judges.

Order;

Concurrence by Judges Berzon and Hurwitz;

Dissent by Judge Collins

* The Honorable Stephanie Dawn Thacker, United States Circuit 

Judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, sitting by 

designation.

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 1 of 48
2 UNITED STATES V. COOLEY

SUMMARY**

Criminal Law

The panel filed an order denying a petition for panel 

rehearing and denying on behalf of the court a petition for 

rehearing en banc, in a case in which the panel affirmed the 

district court’s order granting a motion to suppress evidence 

obtained as a result of the defendant’s encounter with a Crow 

Indian Reservation police officer while the defendant’s truck 

was parked on the shoulder of United States Route 212, 

which is a public right-of-way that crosses the Reservation.

Concurring in the denial of rehearing en banc, Judges 

Berzon and Hurwitz wrote that even within the questionable 

genre of dissents from denial of rehearing en banc, Judge 

Collins’s dissent is an outlier that misrepresents the legal 

context of this case and wildly exaggerates the purported 

consequences of the panel opinion.

Dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc, Judge 

Collins, joined by Judges Bea, Bennett, and Bress, wrote that 

the panel’s extraordinary decision directly contravenes longestablished Ninth Circuit and Supreme Court precedent, 

disregards contrary authority from other state and federal 

appellate courts, and threatens to seriously undermine the 

ability of Indian tribes to ensure public safety for the 

hundreds of thousands of persons who live on reservations 

within the Ninth Circuit.

** This summary constitutes no part of the opinion of the court. It 

has been prepared by court staff for the convenience of the reader.

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 2 of 48
UNITED STATES V. COOLEY 3

ORDER

The panel has voted to deny the petition for panel 

rehearing and petition for rehearing en banc.

The full court was advised of the petition for rehearing 

en banc. A judge requested a vote on whether to rehear the 

matter en banc. The matter failed to receive a majority of 

the votes of the nonrecused active judges in favor of en banc 

consideration. Fed R. App. P. 35.

The petition for rehearing en banc is denied. Attached 

are a dissent from and a concurrence respecting the denial of 

rehearing en banc.

BERZON and HURWITZ, Circuit Judges, concurring in the 

denial of rehearing en banc:

Even within the questionable genre of dissents from 

denial of rehearing en banc, see Martin v. City of Boise, 

920 F.3d 584, 588 (9th Cir. 2019) (Berzon, J., concurring in 

denial of rehearing en banc), Judge Collins’s dissent to the 

denial of rehearing (“dissent”) is an outlier. It misrepresents 

the legal context of this case and wildly exaggerates the 

purported consequences of the panel opinion.

I

This case involves an unusual factual scenario and a 

technical issue of Indian tribal authority. It certainly does not 

present a “question of exceptional importance” meriting en 

banc consideration. Fed. R. App. P. 35(a)(2). There is no 

conflict among the circuits regarding the question presented 

here, the opinion is not in conflict with a Supreme Court 

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 3 of 48
4 UNITED STATES V. COOLEY

decision, and the practical implications are limited. The 

opinion recognizes that tribal officers can stop non-Indians 

on state and federal rights-of-way across Indian reservations 

long enough to determine whether they are Indians, and also 

can detain them long enough to turn them over to state or 

federal authorities if they were obviously—apparently—

violating state or federal law when stopped. So in the case of 

a speed demon or a drunk driver, Indian authorities can 

intervene. The issues in this case arise only when a tribal 

officer, as here, who is not cross-deputized on non-Indian 

lands, takes it on himself to investigate whether a non-Indian 

on a federal or state highway right-of-way committed some 

crime that is not apparent—in other words, a crime that has 

nothing to do with demonstrated danger on the highway.

II

Nor does the panel opinion “conflict[] with a decision of 

the United States Supreme Court.” Fed. R. App. P. 

35(b)(1)(A). The dissent maintains that the panel opinion 

missed a whole category of Supreme Court authority for 

Indian law enforcement officers—Category Two in the 

dissent’s taxonomy. Dissent at 25–27. According to the 

dissent, that category allows tribal officers to Terry stop and 

investigate non-Indians who are on alienated fee land or 

federal and state highways that cross Indian reservations. 

But Category Two does not exist.

As the panel opinion explains, the first basis of authority 

for tribal officers derives from the inherent power of Indian 

tribes, as sovereigns, to enforce criminal law against tribal 

members or nonmember Indians (“Indians”) on tribal land. 

United States v. Lara, 541 U.S. 193, 197–200 (2004). Tribes 

have no criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians, even when 

they are in Indian country. Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian 

Tribe, 435 U.S. 191, 195 (1978).

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 4 of 48
UNITED STATES V. COOLEY 5

The second source of tribal officers’ enforcement 

authority is tribes’ “undisputed power to exclude persons 

whom they deem to be undesirable from tribal lands.” Duro 

v. Reina, 495 U.S. 676, 696 (1990). That power includes the 

authority of tribal officers to investigate and “eject” nonIndians who “disturb public order on the reservation.” Id.

at 697; see United States v. Becerra-Garcia, 397 F.3d 1167, 

1175 (9th Cir. 2005) (“Intrinsic in tribal sovereignty is the 

power to exclude trespassers from the reservation, a power 

that necessarily entails investigating potential trespassers.”).

The Supreme Court has definitively ruled, however, that 

this power to exclude—and so the authority to investigate 

non-Indians—does not extend to land within the borders of 

Indian reservations that is non-Indian, including fee land 

owned by non-Indians and federal and state highways within 

reservations. Strate v. A–1 Contractors held that “for [nonIndian] governance purposes,” state (and federal) rights-ofway are equivalent to “alienated, non-Indian land” and so 

“[t]ribes cannot assert a landowner’s right to occupy and 

exclude” from such rights-of-way. 520 U.S. 438, 454, 456 

(1997).

As this Court summarized in Bressi v. Ford, those two 

sources of authority are the only ones available to tribal 

officers:

Unlike the case within most of the 

reservation, the Nation is not a gate-keeper on 

a public right of way that crosses the 

reservation. See Strate v. A–1 Contractors,

520 U.S. 438, 455–56 . . . . The usual tribal 

power of exclusion of nonmembers does not 

apply there. See id.

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 5 of 48
6 UNITED STATES V. COOLEY

On the other hand, the state highway is 

still within the reservation and is part of 

Indian country. 18 U.S.C. § 1151(a). The 

tribe therefore has full law enforcement 

authority over its members and nonmember 

Indians on that highway. See United States v. 

Lara, 541 U.S. 193, 210 . . . . The tribe 

accordingly is authorized to stop and arrest 

Indian violators of tribal law traveling on the 

highway. In the absence of some form of state 

authorization, however, tribal officers have 

no inherent power to arrest and book nonIndian violators. See Oliphant v. Suquamish 

Indian Tribe, 435 U.S. 191 . . . . This 

limitation has led to obvious practical 

difficulties. For example, a tribal officer who 

observes a vehicle violating tribal law on a 

state highway has no way of knowing 

whether the driver is an Indian or non-Indian. 

The solution is to permit the officer to stop the 

vehicle and to determine first whether or not 

the driver is an Indian. In order to permit 

tribal officers to exercise their legitimate 

tribal authority, therefore, it has been held not 

to violate a non-Indian’s rights when tribal 

officers stop him or her long enough to 

ascertain that he or she is, in fact, not an 

Indian. See Schmuck, 850 P.2d at 1337. If the 

violator turns out to be a non-Indian, the 

tribal officer may detain the violator and 

deliver him or her to state or federal 

authorities. Id.; see Strate, 520 U.S. at 456 n. 

11 . . . .

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 6 of 48
UNITED STATES V. COOLEY 7

This rule permitting tribal authority over 

non-Indians on a public right-of-way is thus 

a concession to the need for legitimate tribal 

law enforcement against Indians in Indian 

country, including the state highways. The 

amount of intrusion or inconvenience to the 

non-Indian motorist is relatively minor, and 

is justified by the tribal law enforcement 

interest. Ordinarily, there must be some 

suspicion that a tribal law is being violated, 

probably by erratic driving or speeding, to 

cause a stop, and the amount of time it takes 

to determine that the violator is not an Indian 

is not great. If it is apparent that a state or 

federal law has been violated, the officer may 

detain the non-Indian for a reasonable time 

in order to turn him or her over to state or 

federal authorities. Id.

575 F.3d 891, 895–96 (9th Cir. 2009) (emphases added). In 

sum, only “[i]f it is apparent that a state or federal law has 

been violated” may “the [tribal] officer . . . detain the nonIndian for a reasonable time in order to turn him or her over 

to state or federal authorities.” Id. at 896 (emphasis added).

No Supreme Court or Ninth Circuit case since Strate has 

divined a third source of tribal authority over criminal 

activities of non-Indians—the power to investigate criminal 

activity by non-Indians on alienated fee land or federal and 

state rights-of-way. The dissent nonetheless insists that 

implicit in the limited authority of tribal officers is the power 

to stop known non-Indians on reasonable suspicion, 

pursuant to Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968), and then 

investigate whether any law enforcement violation has 

occurred. Dissent at 25–27. If that authority existed, then 

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 7 of 48
8 UNITED STATES V. COOLEY

tribal police could stop, investigate, and detain known nonIndians anywhere within the boundaries of a reservation for 

any reasonably suspected crime.

In support of this supposed broad authority, the dissent 

quotes Duro’s statement that “[t]ribal law enforcement 

authorities have the power to restrain those who disturb 

public order on the reservation, and if necessary to eject 

them.” Dissent at 26 (quoting Duro, 495 U.S. at 697). But 

Duro was explaining the tribal power to exclude, as the 

preceding sentence indicates. 495 U.S. at 696–97. Duro, 

decided before Strate, did not delineate a separate power to 

detain and investigate non-Indians on alienated non-Indian 

land within a reservation’s boundaries or on federal and state 

rights-of-way (which were not at issue in Duro).

The dissent relies on two other sources for its vehement 

accusations that the panel ignored its supposed Category 

Two. The first is a brief and tentative footnote in Strate:

We do not here question the authority of 

tribal police to patrol roads within a 

reservation, including rights-of-way made 

part of a state highway, and to detain and turn 

over to state officers nonmembers stopped on 

the highway for conduct violating state law. 

Cf. State v. Schmuck, 121 Wash.2d 373, 390

. . . (en banc) (recognizing that a limited tribal 

power “to stop and detain alleged offenders 

in no way confers an unlimited authority to 

regulate the right of the public to travel on the 

Reservation’s roads”), cert. denied, 510 U.S. 

931 . . . (1993).

520 U.S. at 456 n.11. This footnote, as Bressi explained, at 

most preserved the right of tribal officers to detain nonCase: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 8 of 48
UNITED STATES V. COOLEY 9

Indians when, in the course of pulling over an unknown 

offender, the officer identifies the individual as non-Indian 

but the state or federal legal violation is “apparent.” 575 F.3d 

at 896.

That was not the case here. Cooley was not “stopped on 

the highway for conduct violating state law.” 520 U.S. at 456 

n.11. He was not driving when approached by the tribal 

officer and was not seen “violating state law.” Instead, the 

tribal officer undertook to investigate him for non-apparent, 

non-traffic-related criminal activity and searched his 

vehicle. The opinion in this case is entirely consistent with 

the Strate footnote.1

The dissent’s other key accusation is that the panel 

opinion disregarded a pre-Strate case from this Court, OrtizBarraza v. United States, 512 F.2d 1176 (9th Cir. 1975). But 

Ortiz-Barraza is plainly no longer good law.

In Ortiz-Barraza, a non-Indian was stopped by a tribal 

officer and detained in the absence of an obvious legal 

violation. Ortiz-Barraza rested squarely on Indian tribes’ 

“power to exclude trespassers from the reservation,” id. at 

1179; see id. at 1180—the same power that Strate later held 

does not extend within reservation boundaries to alienated 

fee land or federal and state rights-of-way, 520 U.S. at 456. 

Further, Ortiz-Barraza concluded that the “[r]ights of way 

running through a reservation remain part of the reservation 

and within the territorial jurisdiction of the tribal police.” 

1 The dissent also points to Strate’s citation of State v. Schmuck, 

121 Wash.2d 373 (1993) (en banc). That Strate cites Schmuck to 

emphasize the limits of an officer’s power to “stop and detain,” 520 U.S. 

at 456 n.11, reinforces our holding that Officer Saylor acted beyond the 

scope of the Tribe’s sovereign authority when he conducted a search of 

Cooley.

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 9 of 48
10 UNITED STATES V. COOLEY

512 F.2d at 1180. Strate held directly to the contrary on that 

point as well. 520 U.S. at 454.

III

The dissent also maintains that even if Officer Saylor did 

act beyond his authority in detaining Cooley to investigate 

whether he was violating some law, “Saylor did not act 

outside his territorial jurisdiction,” Dissent at 40, so United 

States v. Henderson, 906 F.3d 1109 (9th Cir. 2018), is not, 

as the panel held, controlling.

Wrong. Because Cooley is not an Indian, the highway 

was “equivalent, for [non-Indian] governance purposes, to 

alienated, non-Indian land” when Saylor conducted his 

investigation and search. Strate, 520 U.S. at 454. Henderson

held that a magistrate judge who “issued a warrant in excess 

of her jurisdictional authority” violated the Fourth 

Amendment. 906 F.3d at 1116–17. In imagining some 

fundamental difference between the magistrate in 

Henderson and the tribal officer here, the dissent once again 

ignores that Strate held state and federal highways within 

reservations outside the jurisdiction of tribal officials with 

regard to non-Indians.

Nor is it true that “the problem here (if any)” is that 

Saylor’s “actions were not within the scope of his authority.” 

Dissent at 41. Saylor had no authority to act for the state at 

all because he was not a state actor. Bressi, 575 F.3d at 896. 

That Saylor could have been a state actor had he been 

deputized as one is irrelevant; the Federal Rules of Criminal 

Procedure could have authorized the magistrate in 

Henderson to issue warrants to search computers located 

outside her district, and they subsequently were amended to 

do just that. See Fed. R. Crim. P. 41(b)(6). Saylor’s limited 

jurisdiction under federal Indian law as a tribal officer—not 

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 10 of 48
UNITED STATES V. COOLEY 11

the unrealized potential for a voluntary agreement between 

the Crow Tribe and the State of Montana broadening his 

authority—is what is relevant. For that reason, Virginia v. 

Moore, 553 U.S. 164, 176 (2008), which held that “state 

restrictions do not alter the Fourth Amendment’s 

protections,” has no application here.

IV

The Supreme Court has in the last few decades 

prescribed distinct limits on tribal authority over non-Indians 

even within the geographical boundaries of Indian 

reservations. It is the dissent, not the panel, that has 

expanded tribal authority well beyond those limits by 

“mix[ing] up . . . distinct sources of tribal authority over nonIndians.” Dissent at 29.

For the foregoing reasons, we concur in the denial of 

rehearing en banc.

COLLINS, Circuit Judge, with whom BEA, BENNETT, and 

BRESS, Circuit Judges, join, dissenting from the denial of 

rehearing en banc:

The panel’s extraordinary decision in this case directly 

contravenes long-established Ninth Circuit and Supreme 

Court precedent, disregards contrary authority from other 

state and federal appellate courts, and threatens to seriously 

undermine the ability of Indian tribes to ensure public safety 

for the hundreds of thousands of persons who live on 

reservations within the Ninth Circuit. I respectfully dissent 

from our failure to rehear this case en banc.

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 11 of 48
12 UNITED STATES V. COOLEY

For more than 40 years, we have held that, when a nonIndian is reasonably suspected of violating state or federal 

law anywhere within the boundaries of an Indian reservation 

(including state or federal highways traversing the 

reservation), tribal police officers have the authority to 

conduct on-the-spot investigations of the sort authorized 

under Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968). See Ortiz-Barraza 

v. United States, 512 F.2d 1176, 1180–81 (9th Cir. 1975). 

Under this well-settled law, the tribe’s conceded lack of 

criminal jurisdiction over such non-Indians, see Oliphant v. 

Suquamish Indian Tribe, 435 U.S. 191 (1978), does not

deprive the tribe of the authority to conduct Terry-style

investigations of non-Indians and, if probable cause arises, 

to then turn the non-Indian suspect over to the appropriate 

state or federal authorities for criminal prosecution. OrtizBarraza, 512 F.2d at 1180–81. Over the intervening years, 

numerous courts have expressly endorsed Ortiz-Barraza’s 

conclusion that tribes may detain and investigate nonIndians for suspected violations of state and federal law, 

correctly recognizing that “the power to maintain public 

order by investigating violations of state law on the 

reservation . . . is clearly an incident of general tribal 

sovereignty.” State v. Pamperien, 967 P.2d 503, 505 (Or. 

Ct. App. 1998); see also United States v. Terry, 400 F.3d 

575, 579–80 (8th Cir. 2005); State v. Schmuck, 850 P.2d 

1332, 1340–42 (Wash. 1993); State v. Haskins, 887 P.2d 

1189, 1195–96 (Mont. 1994).

Without even so much as a mention of our controlling 

decision in Ortiz-Barraza, the panel in this case sweeps 

away four decades of settled law and instead announces that 

Indian tribes now “lack the ancillary power to investigate 

non-Indians” for reasonably suspected violations of state or 

federal law that occur on state or federal highways, or on 

non-Indian fee lands, within the reservation. United States 

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 12 of 48
UNITED STATES V. COOLEY 13

v. Cooley, 919 F.3d 1135, 1141 (9th Cir. 2019) (emphasis 

added). According to the panel, tribal officers’ previously 

straightforward authority to stop any driver, Indian or nonIndian, based on the familiar reasonable suspicion standard, 

see Heien v. North Carolina, 574 U.S. 54, 60 (2014), has 

now been replaced by the following convoluted series of 

rules that turn on what the officer does or does not know 

about the driver’s tribal status:

• A tribal officer only has the authority to “stop those 

suspected of violating tribal law on public rights-ofway”—not state or federal law—and even then only 

“as long as the suspect’s Indian status is unknown” 

(or is known to be Indian). Cooley, 919 F.3d at 1142 

(emphasis added).

• Once a tribal officer has stopped a driver whose 

status is unknown, the officer’s “initial authority is 

limited to ascertaining whether the person is an 

Indian.” Id.

• If, in the course of the “limited interaction” necessary 

to determine that the driver is a non-Indian, the 

officer happens to discover an “‘obvious’ or 

‘apparent’ violation[] of state or federal law,” he or 

she may continue to detain that person until the 

appropriate state or federal officials can take custody. 

Id. (citation omitted). This limited detention 

authority, however, “does not allow officers to 

search a known non-Indian for the purpose of finding 

evidence of a crime.” Id. (emphasis added).

• But if the non-Indian has not committed an 

“obvious” violation of state or federal law, then the 

officer may not detain the person further, conduct 

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 13 of 48
14 UNITED STATES V. COOLEY

any investigation of the non-Indian, or conduct any 

searches. Id. at 1142–43.

• If the officer nonetheless persists, then the officer is 

acting outside his or her jurisdiction, and the officer’s 

conduct is presumptively unreasonable under Fourth 

Amendment principles. Id. at 1145–46.1 The 

officer, however, may still exercise the very limited 

authority that a private citizen would have had 

“under the common law of the founding era.” Id. at 

1146. That authority is limited to seizing a violator 

whom the officer has “personally observed” commit 

a “felony,” and does not include any authority to 

conduct searches. Id. at 1146–47 & n.9 (emphasis 

added).

• Likewise, if before any stop is made, the tribal officer 

already knows that the suspected violator is a nonIndian, the officer’s power is limited to the citizen’sarrest authority of seizing those whom the officer 

personally observed commit a felony. Id. at 1142, 

1146.

By allowing tribal officers to detain non-Indians only for 

“obvious” violations of state or federal law or for felonies 

committed in the officer’s presence, the net effect of the 

panel’s remarkable decision is to replace the easily 

administered reasonable suspicion standard that has applied 

for decades under Ortiz-Barraza with a novel and complex 

1 Although the Fourth Amendment does not apply directly to Indian 

tribes, see Duro v. Reina, 495 U.S. 676, 693 (1990), Congress has 

subjected tribes to Fourth Amendment standards by statute under the 

Indian Civil Rights Act (ICRA). See 25 U.S.C. § 1302(a)(2).

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 14 of 48
UNITED STATES V. COOLEY 15

set of standards, all of which are more demanding than 

ordinary probable cause.

Judge Berzon’s and Judge Hurwitz’s concurrence in the 

denial of rehearing en banc belatedly attempts to defend the 

panel’s stealth overruling of Ortiz-Barraza by contending 

that our holding in that case was abrogated by the U.S. 

Supreme Court’s intervening decision in Strate v. A–1 

Contractors, 520 U.S. 438 (1997). See Concurrence at 9–

10. That is demonstrably wrong. Far from undermining 

Ortiz-Barraza, Strate reaffirms its continued validity by 

expressly endorsing the authority of tribal officers to conduct 

traffic stops of “nonmembers” for “conduct violating state

law,” and to do so on all “roads within a reservation, 

including rights-of-way made part of a state highway.” 520 

U.S. at 456 n.11 (emphasis added). Indeed, as support for 

this conclusion, the U.S. Supreme Court quoted the 

Washington Supreme Court’s express endorsement of such 

“limited tribal power ‘to stop and detain alleged offenders’” 

in Schmuck, see Strate, 520 U.S. at 456 n.11 (quoting 

Schmuck, 850 P.2d at 1341), and on that very same cited 

page, Schmuck in turn explicitly based its recognition of that 

authority on our decision in Ortiz-Barraza. See 850 P.2d 

at 1341 (“We agree with the Ninth Circuit.”). At a 

minimum, Ortiz-Barraza is easily reconciled with Strate, 

and the panel therefore wholly lacked authority to flout that 

controlling Ninth Circuit precedent. Miller v. Gammie, 

335 F.3d 889, 900 (9th Cir. 2003) (en banc) (three-judge 

panel may disregard prior precedent only when it is “clearly 

irreconcilable” with intervening Supreme Court or en banc 

authority).

The panel’s decision in this case is plagued by a further 

critical legal error that independently warrants en banc 

review. Having concluded that the tribal officer in this case 

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 15 of 48
16 UNITED STATES V. COOLEY

acted outside the scope of what, “under the law of the 

founding era, a private citizen could lawfully” have done, the 

panel suppressed the evidence “obtained as a result” of that 

encounter. 919 F.3d at 1140, 1148.2 But the panel’s 

limitation of tribal officer authority to that of founding-era 

private citizens rests on an erroneous analogy to searches 

and seizures conducted outside of an officer’s geographic

jurisdiction. Even if one assumes arguendo that the panel is 

correct in concluding that tribal officers who have not been 

cross-deputized under state law may not conduct Terry-style 

inquiries of non-Indians on state or federal highways within

the reservation, the proper analogy would be to a law 

enforcement officer who lacks state-law authority to take 

particular actions within his or her territorial jurisdiction. 

The law is settled, however, that such deficiencies in statelaw authorization are irrelevant to the Fourth Amendment 

evaluation of the reasonableness of a search or seizure. See, 

e.g., Virginia v. Moore, 553 U.S. 164, 171–76 (2008); 

Martinez-Medina v. Holder, 673 F.3d 1029, 1037 (9th Cir. 

2011); Saunders v. Silva, 473 Fed. App’x 769, 770 (9th Cir. 

2012); see also Johnson v. Phillips, 664 F.3d 232, 238 (8th 

Cir. 2011).

Moreover, the panel’s deeply flawed decision involves 

questions of extraordinary practical importance that merit en 

banc review. Although the concurrence claims that this case 

involves a “technical issue of Indian tribal authority” whose 

“practical implications are limited,” see Concurrence at 3–4, 

nothing could be further from the truth. The elimination of 

2 This, in turn, involved the further novel holding that violations of 

ICRA warrant the remedy of suppression to the same extent as a Fourth 

Amendment violation. See 919 F.3d at 1143–45. The Government, 

however, conceded this issue in its opening brief, and it has not raised 

that issue in its petition for rehearing.

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 16 of 48
UNITED STATES V. COOLEY 17

tribal Terry-stop authority with respect to non-Indians on fee 

lands and public highways—which the panel replaces with 

standards that are higher than probable cause—is a very big 

deal, because it threatens to have a dramatic effect on public 

safety within the many Indian reservations in this circuit. 

Although reservations vary widely, there are some in which 

a large percentage of the reservation’s land area is nonIndian fee land, and some that have very significant numbers 

of non-Indian residents. The panel thus strips tribes of a 

critical element of their sovereign authority to maintain 

public order with respect to what, in some cases, will be a 

significant portion of the people or land within the 

reservation. The concurrence may be right that the “practical 

limitations” of the panel decision are “limited” for those of 

us who do not live on Indian reservations, but for the 

hundreds of thousands who do, it makes a great deal of 

difference if tribal law enforcement lacks on-the-spot 

authority to detain and investigate non-Indians based on the 

familiar reasonable suspicion standard. If Supreme Court 

precedent truly required that we blow such a gaping hole in 

tribal law enforcement, then we would be obligated, as an 

“inferior Court[],” to do so. See U.S. Const., art. III, § 1. 

But nothing in Strate requires the panel’s troubling disregard 

of sovereign tribal authority. On the contrary, adherence to 

Supreme Court and Ninth Circuit precedent forbids what the 

panel has done here.

I respectfully dissent from our refusal to rehear this case 

en banc.

I

A

Around 1:00 AM on February 26, 2016, after completing 

his shift, Crow Tribal highway safety officer James Saylor 

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 17 of 48
18 UNITED STATES V. COOLEY

was driving eastbound along U.S. Highway 212, a federal 

right-of-way on the Crow Indian Reservation in southern 

Montana.3 Saylor passed a white Dodge pickup truck parked 

on the westbound shoulder of the highway with its 

headlights on, and since that area was known to him as “a 

very dangerous stretch of road,” Saylor decided to go back 

and conduct a “welfare” check. In pulling up behind the 

Dodge, Saylor intentionally did not activate his overhead 

lights because he “didn’t want the occupants of the vehicle 

to feel as though [he] was detaining them.”

As he approached the vehicle, Saylor heard that the 

Dodge’s engine was running and saw that it had Wyoming 

license plates. He also noticed that the pickup truck had “a 

lot of stuff in the bed of the truck,” which was filled almost 

to the “bed rails with different items.” The passenger 

compartment had dark windows, and it also “appeared to be 

lifted with some kind of lift or leveling kit” and had 

“oversized tires.” Saylor knocked on the side of the truck, 

and the rear driver-side window briefly rolled down and then 

rolled back up. Saylor “expected the front driver’s side 

window to roll down after that, as if maybe somebody had 

hit the wrong button,” but it did not. During the brief period 

the rear window was down, Saylor thought he saw a small 

child “crawling around in the back.”

Saylor shined his flashlight through the tinted front 

driver-side window, and he saw a man (Cooley) who then 

gave him what appeared to be a thumbs-down sign. Saylor 

“didn’t know what he was trying to convey, if his window 

wouldn’t go down, or if he wasn’t okay.” Saylor asked 

Cooley if he could get his window down, and Cooley 

3 This summary is based primarily on the testimony of Officer 

Saylor at the suppression hearing. See Cooley, 919 F.3d at 1139 n.1.

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 18 of 48
UNITED STATES V. COOLEY 19

lowered it about 4–6 inches. Saylor could see that Cooley 

“had watery, bloodshot eyes,” and that he “appeared to be 

non-native.” Saylor also saw a toddler (who turned out to be 

Cooley’s son) crawl from the back seat onto Cooley’s lap. 

Saylor asked if everything was OK, and Cooley responded 

that he had pulled over because he was tired. That was not 

uncommon in Saylor’s experience, although it also was not 

“uncommon to come across a motorist that is impaired and 

has pulled over because of that impairment.” Not having 

excluded the latter possibility, Saylor decided that “as long 

as [Cooley] was willing to talk with me, I was willing to talk 

with him to make sure of the welfare of him and the child.”

Saylor asked where Cooley had driven from, expecting 

that he might have stopped after a long drive. Cooley 

responded, however, that he had driven from Lame Deer, 

which Saylor knew to be a town that was less than half an 

hour away in the adjacent Northern Cheyenne Indian 

Reservation. (Saylor had previously served as a Bureau of 

Indian Affairs (BIA) police officer on that reservation for 

several years.) Saylor asked, “what he was up to in Lame 

Deer,” and Cooley responded that he had gone there to buy 

a vehicle from someone named “Thomas,” either “Thomas 

Spang” or “Thomas Shoulder Blade.” Saylor recognized 

both names—Thomas Spang had been involved in drug 

trafficking and Thomas Shoulder Blade had been a BIA 

employee.

Saylor thought it was odd that Cooley had been 

attempting to purchase a vehicle so late at night, and he also 

thought it was odd that Cooley did not have another adult 

with him. As Saylor explained at the suppression hearing, 

when buying a car, “I’ve always had another passenger with 

me to drive my new purchase, especially if I’m going in a 

vehicle that I already own, unless I’m trading it in.” Saylor 

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 19 of 48
20 UNITED STATES V. COOLEY

questioned Cooley further, and Cooley responded that the 

vehicle he was supposed to buy “had broken down and that 

Thomas had allowed him to use the vehicle that he was in.” 

This response puzzled Saylor even more, because he “didn’t 

understand why somebody would allow the use of a vehicle 

with all the personal belongings that [he had] seen in the 

bed.” He also did not understand why Thomas Spang or 

Thomas Shoulder Blade would have a vehicle registered in 

Wyoming; in his experience, most Northern Cheyenne 

members either had “a Northern Cheyenne license plate 

through the State of Montana, or they wouldn’t have any 

registration at all.”

Saylor was having a hard time understanding Cooley, 

because the engine was running and because Cooley “was 

even sounding as though he had some slurred words.” 

Saylor asked Cooley to lower the window so that he could 

hear better, and Cooley did so. At that point, Saylor saw 

what appeared to be “two semiautomatic rifles” on the front 

passenger seat. Having weapons in a vehicle was not 

uncommon in Montana, in Saylor’s experience, but he was 

further puzzled when Cooley said that the guns belonged to 

Thomas. As Saylor explained at the hearing, “I have never 

known an instance . . . where somebody has lent somebody 

else their vehicle with all of their property to include 

firearms.”

At this point, Saylor asked Cooley for his ID. In 

response, Cooley did not retrieve his ID, but instead began 

pulling out of his pocket “small denomination bills” and 

putting them in a compartment in the console area. The third 

or fourth time Cooley reached for his pocket, Saylor “noticed 

a change in his demeanor.” Rather than glance in Saylor’s 

direction, as he had done on the other instances, Cooley 

“started staring straight forward out of the windshield of his 

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 20 of 48
UNITED STATES V. COOLEY 21

truck, as if he was looking through his son” on his lap. 

Cooley’s “breathing really became shallow and rapid, and he 

had a moment where he just wasn’t doing anything, wasn’t 

moving.” As someone who taught other officers as a “useof-force instructor,” Saylor thought this seemed like what is 

sometimes called a “thousand-yard stare,” which can be a 

sign of an imminent assault. At that point, Saylor drew his 

weapon, but did not point it at Cooley. Saylor ordered him 

to keep his hands visible and to slowly retrieve his ID “and 

only his ID.” Cooley then produced a Wyoming driver’s 

license. Saylor tried to call in the license on the spot with 

his hand-held radio, but he could not get a signal. Although 

Saylor thought the radio in his patrol car would work, he 

concluded that for safety reasons he could not simply go 

back to his vehicle.

Instead, Saylor went around the back of the Dodge to the 

passenger side, so that he would have some ability to shield 

himself if the encounter turned violent. Saylor then opened 

the passenger door and confirmed that no one else was in the 

vehicle. Saylor saw that, “in the area where [Cooley] had 

been reaching his hand” earlier, there was a loaded 

semiautomatic pistol. Saylor asked why Cooley had not 

mentioned the pistol, and Cooley said that he had not known 

it was there. Saylor reached for the pistol and disarmed it, 

and he could see that the rifles were unloaded.

Saylor testified that, at a minimum, he wanted to run the 

driver’s license at his patrol car, and so he ordered Cooley 

out of the truck. After patting down Cooley, Saylor moved 

to place Cooley and his son in the patrol unit. Cooley asked 

if he could first empty his pockets, and in addition to bills, 

Cooley removed small Ziploc bags that Saylor thought were 

commonly used “for the packaging and sale of narcotics, 

specifically, in [his] experience, methamphetamines.” 

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 21 of 48
22 UNITED STATES V. COOLEY

Recalling that at some point in their conversation Cooley had 

vaguely mentioned that somebody might be coming to meet 

him at the side of the road, Saylor decided to radio for 

backup and to secure the scene before running a records 

check. Saylor retrieved the rifles and pistol from the Dodge, 

turned off the ignition, and took the keys. In leaning to reach 

the keys, he noticed “glass, smoking pipe and [a] plastic 

baggie containing what appeared to be methamphetamine.” 

Other officers soon arrived, including a county deputy. A 

subsequent search of the vehicle disclosed more than 

50 grams of methamphetamine.

B

Cooley was indicted in the district court on drugtrafficking and firearms charges, and he moved to suppress 

evidence from his encounter with Saylor. The district court 

conducted a hearing and granted Cooley’s motion to 

suppress.

The Government appealed and the panel affirmed. See

Cooley, 919 F.3d 1135. The panel held that, because tribes 

lack the authority to exclude non-Indians from state or 

federal highways that run through a reservation, tribes “lack 

the ancillary power to investigate non-Indians who are using 

such public rights-of-way.” Id. at 1141. According to the 

panel, a tribe may stop anyone suspected of violating tribal

law on public rights-of-way “as long as the suspect’s Indian 

status is unknown.” Id. at 1142. Once a suspected violator 

is stopped, the officer “will typically need ‘to ask one 

question’ to determine whether the suspect is an Indian.” Id. 

(citation omitted). If the suspect turns out to be a non-Indian, 

then (according to the panel) the tribal officer may conduct 

no further investigation, and the officer may continue to 

detain the non-Indian only if it is then “obvious” or 

“apparent” that the non-Indian has committed a state or 

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 22 of 48
UNITED STATES V. COOLEY 23

federal crime. Id. at 1142, 1147–48. In that circumstance, 

the panel stated, the non-Indian may be detained long 

enough to turn him or her over to the appropriate state or 

federal authorities. Id. at 1142. If the officer persists in the

absence of an obvious violation, then the tribal officer’s 

actions are presumptively unreasonable under Fourth 

Amendment principles, as made applicable under ICRA. Id. 

at 1145–46. The only exception would be that the officer 

could still exercise the citizen’s-arrest authority of a private 

citizen under the “common law of the founding era.” Id. 

at 1146. That, according to the panel, limits the officer to 

arresting for felonies committed in the officer’s presence and 

forbids the officer from conducting any searches. Id. 

at 1146–47 & n.9.

Because Saylor’s actions clearly exceeded the panel’s 

narrow conception of tribal police authority, the panel held 

that Saylor violated the Fourth Amendment principles made 

applicable to tribes under ICRA. Id. at 1148. The panel 

therefore affirmed the order granting Cooley’s motion to 

suppress.

II

To set the panel’s analysis in context, and to make the 

panel’s errors more apparent, it helps first to summarize the 

various sources of tribal authority over non-Indians within 

the boundaries of a reservation.

A

“Tribal authority over the activities of non-Indians on 

reservation lands is an important part of tribal sovereignty.” 

Iowa Mut. Ins. Co. v. LaPlante, 480 U.S. 9, 18 (1987). That 

authority, however, is subject to significant limitations. 

Chief among these is the settled rule that “Indian tribal 

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 23 of 48
24 UNITED STATES V. COOLEY

courts” may not exercise “criminal jurisdiction over nonIndians.” Oliphant, 435 U.S. at 195 (emphasis added). 

Thus, even with respect to conduct by non-Indians within the 

reservation, a tribe may neither apply its substantive criminal 

law to non-Indians nor try a criminal charge against a nonIndian.

As to a tribe’s civil jurisdiction, the tribe’s authority 

depends upon whether the non-Indian’s conduct occurred 

“on tribal land” within the reservation or on land that, while 

still within the reservation, has been “alienated” in fee 

simple to a non-Indian. Strate, 520 U.S. at 454. Tribes 

“retain considerable control over nonmember conduct on 

tribal land,” id. (emphasis added), but “the civil authority of 

Indian tribes and their courts with respect to non-Indian fee 

lands” only extends to non-Indians in the two situations set 

forth in Montana v. United States, 450 U.S. 544 (1981). See 

Strate, 520 U.S. at 453 (emphasis added). A state highway 

running through a reservation is considered, for 

jurisdictional purposes, to be equivalent to reservation “land 

alienated to non-Indians.” Id. at 456.

Under the first Montana exception, a tribe may exercise 

regulatory and adjudicatory jurisdiction over “‘activities of 

nonmembers who enter consensual relationships with the 

tribe or its members, through commercial dealing, contracts, 

leases, or other arrangements.’” Id. at 446 (quoting 

Montana, 450 U.S. at 565). “The second exception to 

Montana’s general rule [of no civil jurisdiction over nonIndians on non-Indian fee lands] concerns conduct that 

‘threatens or has some direct effect on the political integrity, 

the economic security, or the health or welfare of the tribe.’” 

Id. at 457 (quoting Montana, 450 U.S. at 566). To fall within 

this second exception, regulatory or adjudicatory jurisdiction 

must be “‘necessary to protect tribal self-government’” or 

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 24 of 48
UNITED STATES V. COOLEY 25

“crucial to ‘the political integrity, the economic security, or 

the health or welfare’” of the tribe. Id. at 459 (quoting 

Montana, 450 U.S. at 564, 566).

B

Against this general framework of tribal authority over 

non-Indians, the case law recognizes three distinct sources 

of tribal authority to investigate and detain non-Indians 

within the boundaries of a reservation.

1

First, tribes retain, on tribal land, “a landowner’s right 

to occupy and exclude” non-Indians entirely, see Strate, 

520 U.S. at 456, and this “power to exclude trespassers from 

the reservation . . . necessarily entails investigating potential 

trespassers.” United States v. Becerra-Garcia, 397 F.3d 

1167, 1175 (9th Cir. 2005) (emphasis added). Once 

identified, such trespassers can be detained for the limited 

amount of time necessary to expel them from the reservation.

2

Second, a tribe’s sovereignty includes an additional, 

more limited power of expulsion that extends even to nonIndians on alienated fee lands. The fact that tribes lack 

criminal jurisdiction to try non-Indians does not mean that 

they must stand idly by and let non-Indians “violate the law 

with impunity” within the reservation. Duro v. Reina,

495 U.S. at 696. On the contrary, a tribe’s sovereignty 

includes the authority to restrain criminal conduct within the 

reservation and to detain violators so that they may be 

prosecuted by those who do have criminal jurisdiction over 

them:

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 25 of 48
26 UNITED STATES V. COOLEY

Tribal law enforcement authorities have the 

power to restrain those who disturb public 

order on the reservation, and if necessary, to 

eject them. Where jurisdiction to try and 

punish an offender rests outside the tribe, 

tribal officers may exercise their power to 

detain the offender and transport him to the 

proper authorities.

Id. at 697. This more limited power to eject lawbreakers 

does not rest on the general landowner-based power of 

exclusion from tribal lands, because it expressly extends to 

“land alienated to non-Indians,” including “rights-of-way 

made part of a state highway.” Strate, 520 U.S. at 456 & 

n.11.

Moreover, this “power of the [tribe] to exclude nonIndian state and federal law violators from the reservation 

would be meaningless were the tribal police not empowered 

to investigate such violations,” and so “[o]bviously, tribal 

police must have such power.” Ortiz-Barraza, 512 F.2d 

at 1180 (emphasis added). This power to investigate, in turn, 

embraces the power to temporarily detain a non-Indian based 

on reasonable suspicion, and to conduct the sort of limited 

on-the-spot investigation permitted by Terry v. Ohio, 

392 U.S. at 30. See also United States v. Terry, 400 F.3d at 

579–80 (holding that “tribal police officers do not lack 

authority to detain non-Indians whose conduct disturbs the 

public order on their reservation” and that “[a]t the time that 

the tribal officers stopped Mr. Terry they clearly had a 

reasonable and articulable suspicion that ‘criminal activity 

may be afoot’”) (quoting Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. at 30); 

Pamperien, 967 P.2d at 506 & n.4 (“tribal law enforcement 

officers have the authority to investigate on-reservation 

violations of state and federal law as part of the tribe’s 

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 26 of 48
UNITED STATES V. COOLEY 27

inherent power as sovereign,” and this power extends to nonIndians “stopped on a state highway”); Haskins, 887 P.2d at 

1195 (tribe’s power “to restrain non-Indians who commit 

offenses within the exterior boundaries of the reservation 

and to eject them by turning such offenders over to the 

proper authority” includes the ancillary “authority to 

investigate violations of state and federal law”) (emphasis 

added) (citing Ortiz-Barraza, 512 F.2d at 1180); Schmuck, 

850 P.2d at 1341 (“[T]he Tribe’s authority to stop and detain 

is not necessarily based exclusively on the power to exclude 

non-Indians from tribal lands, but may also be derived from 

the Tribe’s general authority as sovereign.”) (emphasis 

omitted).

In Ortiz-Barraza, a tribal police officer on a reservation 

adjoining the border with Mexico developed a reasonable 

suspicion that a pickup truck had crossed the international 

border and might be engaged in “smuggling of contraband.” 

512 F.2d at 1180–81. The officer followed the vehicle onto 

the state highway that ran through the reservation, and he 

approached the vehicle, which had stopped, to briefly 

investigate his suspicions. Id. at 1178. During the ensuing 

encounter, the officer frisked Ortiz-Barraza, searched his 

vehicle, and discovered marijuana. See id. at 1178–79. We 

held that the officer had the authority to conduct this 

investigation of a non-Indian based on reasonable suspicion, 

and we specifically rejected the argument that a different 

conclusion was warranted because the encounter had taken 

place on a state highway. Id. at 1180; see also Pamperien, 

967 P.2d at 505–06 & n.4; Schmuck, 850 P.2d at 1340–41.

3

Third, we have recognized an additional category of 

extremely limited investigatory power over non-Indians that 

is purely ancillary to the tribe’s authority to apply tribal law 

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 27 of 48
28 UNITED STATES V. COOLEY

to tribal members. In Bressi v. Ford, 575 F.3d 891 (9th Cir. 

2009), a tribal police department erected a roadblock across 

a state highway within the reservation in order to “check for 

sobriety, drivers’ licenses, registration, and possession of 

alcohol.” Id. at 894. Because the roadblock was on a state 

highway, which is considered to be equivalent to alienated 

non-Indian fee land, the tribal officers’ detention and 

investigation of all drivers, including non-Indians, could not

be justified under the general power to exclude non-Indians 

from tribal lands. Id. at 895–96. And because the roadblock 

was “suspicionless,” and “[a]ll vehicles are stopped,” id. 

at 896 (emphasis altered), the detention and investigation of 

all drivers, including non-Indians, could not be justified as 

an exercise either of “the power to restrain those who disturb 

public order on the reservation,” Duro, 495 U.S. at 697, or 

the “power . . . to exclude non-Indian state and federal law 

violators from the reservation,” Ortiz-Barraza, 512 F.2d 

at 1180 (emphasis added).

Nonetheless, we stated that an across-the-board 

roadblock could be upheld as being purely ancillary to the 

tribe’s “full law enforcement authority over its members and 

nonmember Indians on that highway.” Bressi, 575 F.3d 

at 896 (emphasis added). Because, however, the tribe’s 

power to enforce tribal law against tribal members does not

extend to non-Indians, a roadblock “established on tribal 

authority” would be “permissible only to the extent that the 

suspicionless stop of non-Indians is limited to the amount of 

time, and the nature of inquiry, that can establish whether or 

not they are Indians.” Id. at 896–97. Consequently, when a 

detention is based solely on such “purely tribal authority,” 

only “apparent” or “obvious violations” of law may prolong 

the detention of a non-Indian, and any “inquiry going beyond 

Indian or non-Indian status, or including searches for 

evidence of crime, are [sic] not authorized” in the “case of 

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 28 of 48
UNITED STATES V. COOLEY 29

non-Indians.” Id. Because, in Bressi, the tribal officers “did 

not confine themselves to inquiring whether [Bressi] was or 

was not an Indian,” their actions fell outside the scope of 

their authority as tribal officers. Id. at 897.4

III

The panel’s decision here mixed up these distinct sources 

of tribal authority over non-Indians and thereby erroneously 

held that the second power described above—the power to 

detain and investigate reasonably suspected non-Indian 

violators of state and federal law—does not exist. Because 

Ortiz-Barraza squarely holds to the contrary, the panel’s 

opinion can only be correct if Ortiz-Barraza is “clearly 

irreconcilable” with intervening Supreme Court authority. 

Miller v. Gammie, 335 F.3d at 900. That “high standard” is 

not met here. United States v. Delgado-Ramos, 635 F.3d 

1237, 1239 (9th Cir. 2011). Although the panel did not 

mention Ortiz-Barraza at all, the concurrence now asserts 

that Ortiz-Barraza has been overruled by the Supreme 

Court’s decision in Strate. See Concurrence at 9–10. That 

is plainly incorrect.

4 In Bressi, the tribal officers also happened to have been 

empowered under Arizona law to enforce state law within the 

reservation. 575 F.3d at 894. Accordingly, the specific holding of Bressi

was that, because the roadblock could not be characterized as “purely a 

tribal endeavor,” the officers’ conduct of the roadblock took place under 

color of state law and therefore subjected them to suit under § 1983 to 

the extent that the roadblock did not comply with Fourth Amendment 

standards. Id. at 894, 897; see also id. at 895 (noting that § 1983 would 

not have applied to the tribal officers in that case if they had been acting 

under color of tribal law).

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 29 of 48
30 UNITED STATES V. COOLEY

A

The panel’s confused analysis jumbles together these 

various distinct tribal powers and ends up generating a 

convoluted set of rules that will prove difficult for tribal 

officers to administer and that will leave significant gaps in 

their practical ability to ensure public safety on Indian 

reservations.

The panel’s critical mistake was that it held that a tribe’s 

power to investigate potential crimes by non-Indians rests 

solely on the general tribal power to exclude non-Indians 

from tribal lands, i.e., the first power described above. 

Cooley, 919 F.3d at 1141; see also Concurrence at 9–10. 

Because Strate holds that a tribe lacks such a general power 

of exclusion with respect to a “state or federal highway” on 

a right-of-way through the reservation, the panel reasoned, 

“[t]ribes also lack the ancillary power to investigate nonIndians who are using such public rights-of-way.” Cooley, 

919 F.3d at 1141. But as explained below, Strate coupled its 

holding that state highways are equivalent to fee lands with 

an express reaffirmation of the power of tribal officers to 

conduct traffic stops of non-Indians for violations of state 

law. See infra at 34–35. That is, Strate expressly reaffirmed 

the second power described above and recognized in OrtizBarraza.

Having already crossed wires between the first two 

distinct tribal powers discussed above, the panel then 

crossed wires with the third power as well, by further 

claiming that the tribe’s authority to enforce substantive 

tribal law against tribal members (the distinct power

discussed in Bressi) is the sole source for a tribal officer’s 

authority over non-Indians suspected of violating state or 

federal law on public highways. Cooley, 919 F.3d at 1142; 

see also Concurrence at 8–9. According to the panel, a tribal 

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 30 of 48
UNITED STATES V. COOLEY 31

officer may only conduct stops for suspected violations of 

“tribal law,” but since the tribal status of most violators will 

not be known until the driver is pulled over, the officer may 

stop any driver “as long as the suspect’s Indian status is 

unknown.” Cooley, 919 F.3d at 1142 (emphasis added); see 

also Concurrence at 8–9. When a tribal officer thus stops a 

person without knowing whether he or she is an Indian, the 

officer’s “initial authority is limited to ascertaining whether 

the person is an Indian,” and if the person is not, then the 

officer lacks any investigative authority and can only 

continue to detain the non-Indian if it is “‘apparent’ or 

‘obvious’ that state or federal law is being or has been 

violated.” Cooley, 919 F.3d at 1142 (emphasis added) 

(quoting Bressi, 575 F.3d at 896–97). Thus, if a tribal officer 

pulls over a vehicle based merely upon reasonable suspicion

of drunk driving, then once the officer has determined that 

the driver is not an Indian, the officer may conduct no

investigation to dispel the suspicion or to ripen it into 

probable cause—no questions, no breathalyzer, no walking 

in line, etc. See Concurrence at 4 (if a suspected drunk driver 

turns out to be a non-Indian, the driver may be detained only 

if he or she was “obviously—apparently—violating state of 

federal law when stopped”) (emphasis added).

As noted above, the panel held that this Bressi power to 

detain suspected tribal law violators exists only “as long as 

the suspect’s Indian status is unknown.” Cooley, 919 F.3d 

at 1142 (emphasis added); see also Concurrence at 8–9. In 

the panel’s view, when a tribal officer proceeds to detain and 

investigate a person that he or she knows to be a non-Indian, 

the tribal officer’s actions are analogous to those of an 

officer acting outside of his or her geographic jurisdiction. 

Cooley, 919 F.3d at 1145–48. Because the “common law of 

the founding era often deemed searches and seizures 

unreasonable when police officers acted outside the bounds 

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 31 of 48
32 UNITED STATES V. COOLEY

of their sovereign’s jurisdiction,” the panel reasoned, such 

an extra-jurisdictional search or seizure would violate Fourth 

Amendment principles (made applicable to Indian tribes by 

ICRA, 25 U.S.C. § 1302(a)(2)) unless the officer’s actions 

fall within the citizen’s-arrest authority of private citizens 

under the “common law of the founding era.” Id. at 1146. 

Under those common law principles, the panel held, a tribal 

officer in such circumstances could only detain a non-Indian 

whom the officer has “personally observed” to have 

committed a “felony.” Id. (emphasis added). Although the 

panel suggests that this citizen’s-arrest power to stop and 

detain known non-Indians “roughly comports with” the 

Bressi power to continue to detain those who, after being 

stopped, are discovered to be non-Indians who have 

committed an “obvious” state or federal law violation, id. at 

1147, that suggestion is wrong. Given that, according to the 

panel, the citizen’s-arrest power to stop and detain a known

non-Indian extends only to felonies, it will not extend to a 

wide array of serious and dangerous traffic offenses that are 

only misdemeanors. Because, for example, a first-time DUI 

in Montana is generally only a misdemeanor punishable by 

not “more than 6 months” in prison, see Mont. Code Ann. 

§ 61-8-714(1)(a), the panel’s reasoning presumably means 

that a tribal officer cannot stop a drunk driver on a state 

highway if the officer knows the driver is a non-Indian.

Moreover, by holding that a tribal officer’s on-the-spot 

authority thus differs dramatically depending upon the 

officer’s knowledge of Indian status (both before a stop, as 

well as after a stop), the panel’s decision creates a further 

practical problem by placing enormous weight on a factor 

that will often be ill-suited for such on-the-spot resolution. 

Because the panel does not allow a tribal officer to rely on a 

“person’s physical appearance,” officers will likely have to 

“rely on a detainee’s response when asked about Indian 

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 32 of 48
UNITED STATES V. COOLEY 33

status.” 919 F.3d at 1142–43. The incentive to lie, of course, 

will be significant, and because (according to the panel) 

there is no authority to investigate or search a non-Indian, 

the officer presumably cannot search (for example) for a 

tribal identification card (if the person happens to have one). 

And even if the person claims to be an Indian, the panel 

ominously suggests that the officer may not be in the clear 

even then: the panel expressly reserves the question of what 

authority a tribal officer has when he or she “asks whether 

the individual is an Indian and is told, incorrectly, that he is.” 

Id. at 1147 n.10.

Considering all of these practical difficulties and issues 

raised by the panel’s opinion here, I am reminded of Justice 

Scalia’s remark: “There are many questions here, and the 

answers to all of them are ridiculous.” Grady v. Corbin, 495 

U.S. 508, 542 (1990) (Scalia, J., dissenting). But all of these 

intractable practical issues evaporate if we adhere—as we 

must—to our decision in Ortiz-Barraza, because it correctly 

holds that a tribal officer has the on-the-spot power to briefly 

detain and investigate a reasonably suspected lawbreaker 

regardless of whether he or she is known to be a non-Indian. 

Under Ortiz-Barraza, issues over tribal status only affect 

who ultimately can charge and prosecute the person and not 

the Terry v. Ohio authority to temporarily detain and 

investigate the person. If a detainee’s tribal status cannot be 

satisfactorily resolved on the spot, the officer can 

nonetheless continue with the Terry investigation and, if the 

officer’s reasonable suspicion ripens into probable cause, the 

tribal status of the arrestee can then be sorted out as soon as 

practicable (at the stationhouse, if necessary).

Of course, if the Supreme Court in Strate truly foisted 

upon us the byzantine regime described in the panel’s 

opinion, then we are bound to implement it, regardless of 

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 33 of 48
34 UNITED STATES V. COOLEY

what Ortiz-Barraza held. But Cooley’s suggestion that 

Strate overruled Ortiz-Barraza does not survive even casual 

scrutiny. On the contrary, Strate reinforces the correctness 

of Ortiz-Barraza.

B

Three observations about Strate suffice to make clear 

that the panel’s rejection of tribal investigative authority 

over non-Indians on state and federal highways is wrong.

1

First, Strate itself refutes the panel’s assumptions that 

(1) an across-the-board tribal power to conduct Terry-style 

investigations of non-Indians for violations of state or 

federal law can only rest on the general power to exclude 

non-Indians from tribal lands, and (2) any such power is 

therefore inapplicable to state or federal highways within 

reservations. After concluding that a state highway running 

through a reservation is more akin to alienated, non-Indian 

land than to tribal land, the Strate Court immediately added 

the following observation in a footnote:

We do not here question the authority of 

tribal police to patrol roads within a 

reservation, including rights-of-way made 

part of a state highway, and to detain and turn

over to state officers nonmembers stopped on 

the highway for conduct violating state law. 

Cf. State v. Schmuck, 121 Wash. 2d 373, 390, 

850 P.2d 1332, 1341 (en banc) (recognizing 

that a limited tribal power “to stop and detain 

alleged offenders in no way confers an 

unlimited authority to regulate the right of the 

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 34 of 48
UNITED STATES V. COOLEY 35

public to travel on the Reservation’s roads”), 

cert. denied, 510 U.S. 931 (1993).

Strate, 520 U.S. at 456 n.11 (emphasis added). The power 

thus expressly reaffirmed by the Supreme Court—namely, a

tribal officer’s affirmative power to “stop[]” a “nonmember” 

on a state “highway for conduct violating state law”—cannot 

have been based on the general power to exclude from tribal 

lands(the first power described above), because the highway 

is not considered to be equivalent to tribal lands, but rather 

to reservation land that has been alienated to non-Indians. 

Id. at 456. Nor does it rest on the authority to enforce tribal 

law against tribal members (the third power described above, 

which was addressed in Bressi), because the Court explicitly 

described it as a power to conduct traffic “stop[s]” of 

“nonmembers” for violations of “state law.” Id. at 456 n.11 

(emphasis added).5 This is precisely the additional category 

of authority recognized in Ortiz-Barraza, and it is expressly 

affirmed by the Supreme Court in Strate.

2

Second, the Court’s explicit recognition that tribal 

officers may conduct traffic stops of non-Indians for 

violations of state law on state highways within reservations 

can only be understood against the familiar backdrop of the 

settled law governing such stops. The predicate necessary 

to conduct a traffic stop and to temporarily detain the driver 

5 The concurrence is therefore wrong in positing that the power 

reaffirmed in Strate is the one recognized in Bressi rather than the one 

addressed in Ortiz-Barraza. See Concurrence at 8–9. Nothing in 

Strate’s straightforward and express recognition of tribal traffic stop 

authority over non-Indians for violations of state law can be said to adopt 

the bizarre and complex collection of rules that the panel purports to 

derive from the very limited Bressi power. See supra at 12–14.

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 35 of 48
36 UNITED STATES V. COOLEY

is not, as the panel would have it here, an “obvious” violation 

of state law (much less a felony committed in the officer’s 

presence), see 919 F.3d at 1146–47; rather, “officers need 

only ‘reasonable suspicion’—that is, ‘a particularized and 

objective basis for suspecting the particular person stopped’ 

of breaking the law.” Heien, 574 U.S. at 60 (emphasis 

added) (citation omitted). Moreover, “[a] seizure for a 

traffic violation justifies a police investigation of that 

violation. ‘[A] relatively brief encounter,’ a routine traffic 

stop is ‘more analogous to a so-called “Terry stop” . . . than 

to a formal arrest.’” Rodriguez v. United States, 575 U.S. 

348, 354 (2015) (emphasis added) (citation omitted). Thus, 

by explicitly endorsing traffic stops of non-Indians for 

violations of state law on state highways within the 

reservation, the Supreme Court implicitly but unmistakably 

endorsed the concomitant power to conduct an on-the-spot 

investigation of a reasonably suspected state-law violation.

3

Third, Strate’s citation of Schmuck further confirms both 

of these observations and puts definitively to rest any 

suggestion that Strate overruled Ortiz-Barraza. Schmuck

refutes the panel decision’s core premises, which are that 

(1) the Terry-style investigative authority recognized in 

Ortiz-Barraza can only be justified as an exercise of the 

tribe’s plenary power to exclude non-Indians from tribal

lands, and (2) therefore (after Strate) that authority does not 

extend to state highways and other non-tribal lands within 

the reservation. 919 F.3d at 1141–42.

As Schmuck explained, “the Tribe’s authority to stop and 

detain is not necessarily based exclusively on the power to 

exclude non-Indians from tribal lands, but may also be 

derived from the Tribe’s general authority as sovereign.” 

850 P.2d at 1341. Noting that the standards set forth in 

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 36 of 48
UNITED STATES V. COOLEY 37

Montana, 450 U.S. at 563–66, define a tribe’s authority over 

non-Indians on fee land within the reservation, the Schmuck

court held that the on-the-spot power to stop and detain nonIndian violators of state law rested on the tribe’s power 

“‘over the conduct of non-Indians on fee lands within its 

reservation when that conduct threatens or has some direct 

effect on the political integrity, the economic security, or the 

health or welfare of the tribe.’” 850 P.2d at 1341 (emphasis 

in original) (quoting Montana, 450 U.S. at 566) (relying on 

the “second” Montana exception to the general rule against 

asserting regulatory jurisdiction over non-Indians on fee 

land); see also Duro v. Reina, 495 U.S. at 697 (“Tribal law 

enforcement authorities have the power to restrain those who 

disturb public order on the reservation, and if necessary, to 

eject them” by transporting them, if non-Indians, “to the 

proper authorities”). On that basis, Schmuck expressly 

“agree[d] with the Ninth Circuit” when we held in OrtizBarraza that a tribe has “the power to detain when a nonIndian is traveling on a public road.” 850 P.2d at 1340–41. 

The “public roads remain part of the Reservation and are 

within the territorial jurisdiction of the Suquamish tribal 

police, at least for the limited purpose of asserting the 

Tribe’s authority to detain and deliver alleged offenders.” 

Id. at 1341 (emphasis added).6

6 Earlier in its opinion, the Schmuck Court noted that, in the 

circumstances of that case, in which the officer did not know whether the 

person he was stopping was an Indian or a non-Indian, the power to pull 

over any suspected violator could also be viewed as a necessary ancillary 

power to the tribe’s authority to enforce tribal law against tribal

members (i.e., the third power described above, which was addressed in 

Bressi). 850 P.2d at 1336–37. But Schmuck does not state that a tribal 

officer lacks the power to stop and detain reasonably suspected 

lawbreakers known to be non-Indian. On the contrary, as explained, 

Schmuck states that “the Tribe’s authority to stop and detain” nonCase: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 37 of 48
38 UNITED STATES V. COOLEY

The sole authority cited by the Strate Court on the issue 

of tribal traffic stops of non-Indians on state highways—

namely, Schmuck—was thus one that (1) expressly endorsed 

Ortiz-Barraza; (2) explained that the tribal power to stop 

non-Indians on state highways rested, not just on the power 

to exclude (as the panel would have it), but also on the tribe’s 

sovereign power to protect its members; and (3) expressly 

rejected the view that this “limited” authority did not apply 

to non-Indians on state highways. The concurrence buries 

its response to Schmuck in a footnote, claiming that the 

Supreme Court cited Schmuck merely “to emphasize the 

limits” of tribal detention authority. See Concurrence at 9

n.1. This argument is non-responsive, because it ignores 

Schmuck’s description of the power that is included within

those limits—namely, the Ortiz-Barraza power to detain and 

investigate non-Indians based on reasonable suspicion. Far 

from indicating a rejection of Ortiz-Barraza, the Supreme 

Court’s citation of Schmuck can only be viewed as an 

endorsement of our decision in Ortiz-Barraza.

C

The standard for a three-judge panel to find that 

intervening higher authority has overruled one of our 

precedents is high—Ortiz-Barraza must be “clearly 

irreconcilable” with Strate. Miller v. Gammie, 335 F.3d 

at 900. Here, for the reasons set forth above, there is no 

conflict between Strate and Ortiz-Barraza at all. On the 

contrary, Strate affirmatively supports Ortiz-Barraza. But 

at a minimum, the above analysis of Strate shows that it can

easily be reconciled with Ortiz-Barraza, and under Miller v. 

Indians fits comfortably within the tribe’s general sovereign authority to 

protect the tribal community from criminal and dangerous behavior. Id. 

at 1341.

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 38 of 48
UNITED STATES V. COOLEY 39

Gammie, the panel was bound to read the cases consistently, 

if possible, rather than to adopt a reading that purports to 

overrule a prior three-judge panel decision.7

In the proceedings below, the district court granted 

Cooley’s motion to suppress based solely on the ground that 

Officer Saylor lacked the authority to detain and investigate 

a non-Indian for a suspected violation of state or federal law 

on a state highway.8 Because, under Ortiz-Barraza, Officer 

Saylor clearly had such authority, the district court’s order 

should have been reversed.

IV

Even if the panel were correct in concluding that, as a 

matter of federal Indian law, Officer Saylor lacked authority 

to conduct an on-the-spot investigation of a non-Indian 

motorist on a state highway within the reservation, the panel 

separately erred in further holding that this absence of 

7 The concurrence’s heavy reliance on Bressi seems almost to 

suggest that Ortiz-Barraza should no longer be considered good law 

because (in the concurrence’s view) it is inconsistent with Bressi. But, 

of course, Bressi had no authority to overrule Ortiz-Barraza and did not 

purport to do so. And if the concurrence were right in insinuating that 

there is a conflict between Ortiz-Barraza and Bressi, that would be yet 

another reason why we should have reheard this case en banc. In any 

event, Bressi is distinguishable from Ortiz-Barraza because Bressi

addressed the scope of tribal power to conduct “suspicionless stop[s] of 

non-Indians” on public roads. 575 F.3d at 896 (emphasis added).

8 Although the encounter here began, not as a Terry-stop, but as a 

“welfare check” of the occupants of a vehicle sitting by the side of the 

highway, Saylor’s subsequent actions during that encounter rested upon 

the sort of detention and investigatory authority covered by Terry.

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 39 of 48
40 UNITED STATES V. COOLEY

authority violated Fourth Amendment principles applicable 

to Indian tribes under ICRA, 25 U.S.C. § 1302(a)(2).

After concluding that Saylor exceeded the scope of his 

authority as a tribal officer, the panel analogized this case to 

that of an officer executing a warrant, or conducting an 

arrest, outside the officer’s geographic jurisdiction. 

919 F.3d at 1145–48. Such a search or seizure, the panel 

held, would presumptively violate Fourth Amendment 

principles “even if the officer had sufficient substantive 

grounds to conduct it.” Id. at 1145. Accordingly, the panel 

concluded, Saylor’s actions were consistent with “ICRA’s 

Fourth Amendment parallel only if, under the law of the 

founding era, a private citizen could lawfully take those 

actions.” Id. at 1148 (emphasis added). Because Saylor 

exceeded that private-citizen authority, his eventual seizure 

of Cooley during the encounter violated Fourth Amendment 

principles. Id. And because private citizens had no power 

at all to search under the common law of the founding era, 

Saylor’s searches also necessarily violated ICRA’s Fourth 

Amendment parallel. Id.

The panel’s reasoning fails at the very first step, because 

its analogy to a geographically extra-territorial arrest is 

wrong. Here, Saylor did not act outside his territorial

jurisdiction, because all of his actions took place within the 

reservation and in Indian country. The concurrence suggests 

that Saylor did act outside his territorial jurisdiction because 

his actions took place on a highway that, under Strate, is 

“‘equivalent, for [non-Indian] governance purposes, to 

alienated, non-Indian land.’” Concurrence at 10 (quoting 

Strate, 520 U.S. at 454) (footnote omitted) (alteration made 

by concurrence). But alienated, non-Indian land is still land 

within the reservation. See 520 U.S. at 446 (“‘non-Indian fee 

lands’ ... refers to reservation land acquired in fee simple by 

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 40 of 48
UNITED STATES V. COOLEY 41

non-Indian owners”) (emphasis added). As a result, the 

tribe’s “power over nonmembers on non-Indian fee land is 

sharply circumscribed,” Atkinson Trading Co., Inc. v. 

Shirley, 532 U.S. 645, 650 (2001), but it is not non-existent. 

Instead, the tribe may only exercise the limited powers set 

forth in Montana’s two exceptions. Strate, 520 U.S. at 456. 

Thus, the problem here (if any) is not that Saylor acted 

outside his territorial jurisdiction—he did not do so—but 

rather that his actions were not within the scope of his 

authority to perform under the applicable law within his 

geographic jurisdiction. Saylor would have had such 

authority had he been “deputized” under Montana law to 

enforce Montana criminal law against non-Indians within 

the reservation, but as the panel noted, no such crossdesignation agreement exists between the Crow Tribe and 

any state or local law enforcement agency. See 919 F.3d 

at 1141 & n.2; cf. Mont. Code Ann. §§ 18-11-101 et seq. 

(authorizing such “state-tribal cooperative agreements”).

The proper analogy is thus not to an official acting 

outside his or her territorial jurisdiction. See United States 

v. Henderson, 906 F.3d 1109, 1117 (9th Cir. 2018) 

(magistrate judge’s issuance of warrant to be executed 

outside the geographic bounds of the judge’s district violated 

the Fourth Amendment); see also State v. Eriksen, 259 P.3d 

1079, 1083–84 (Wash. 2011) (tribal officer had no authority 

to arrest non-Indian outside reservation, even though he had 

pursued her from inside the reservation; limited Montana

authority over non-Indians was unavailable outside 

reservation boundaries). Rather, the proper analogy is to an 

officer acting without the necessary state-law authorization

to take certain investigatory actions within that officer’s 

geographic jurisdiction. And under settled Supreme Court 

and Ninth Circuit precedent, an officer’s lack of 

authorization under state law to conduct an otherwise 

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 41 of 48
42 UNITED STATES V. COOLEY

reasonable search and seizure within that officer’s territorial 

jurisdiction does not violate the Fourth Amendment. See, 

e.g., Moore, 553 U.S. at 176 (fact that Virginia law 

prohibited arresting defendant for driving on a suspended 

license was immaterial to the Fourth Amendment analysis; 

“while States are free to regulate such arrests however they 

desire, state restrictions do not alter the Fourth 

Amendment’s protections”); Martinez-Medina, 673 F.3d at 

1037 (although “deputy sheriff lacked the authority under 

Oregon law to apprehend Petitioners based solely on a 

violation of federal immigration law,” under “Moore, the 

deputy sheriff’s violation of Oregon law does not constitute 

a Fourth Amendment violation”); Saunders, 473 Fed. App’x 

at 770 (although “Silva, as a Deputy Animal Control Officer 

within the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office, lacked the 

authority to conduct an arrest,” such “‘state restrictions [on 

arrest authority] do not alter the Fourth Amendment’s 

protections’”) (alterations in original) (quoting Moore, 

553 U.S. at 176); see also Johnson v. Phillips, 664 F.3d 

at 235, 238 (although arresting officer, as “an Auxiliary 

Reserve Police Officer, . . . lacked authority under state law 

to conduct a traffic stop or arrest,” that did “not establish that 

his conduct violated the Fourth Amendment”).

The panel purported to distinguish Moore on the grounds 

that there is no contention here that Saylor “act[ed] in 

violation of state (or federal) law,” and that the defect instead 

is that Saylor exceeded the sovereign powers of a tribe by 

investigating Cooley. 919 F.3d at 1147–48 (emphasis 

added); see also Concurrence at 10 (contending that Moore

only applies when state “restrictions” are violated). But as 

the cases cited above show, Moore also applies when (as 

here) the asserted defect is that the officer lacks the 

necessary authorization under state law to conduct a 

particular search or seizure within that officer’s territorial 

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 42 of 48
UNITED STATES V. COOLEY 43

jurisdiction. See supra at 41–42; see also Moore, 553 U.S. 

at 171 (“In Cooper v. California, 386 U.S. 58 (1967), we 

reversed a state court that had held the search of a seized 

vehicle to be in violation of the Fourth Amendment because 

state law did not explicitly authorize the search. We 

concluded that whether state law authorized the search was 

irrelevant.”) (emphasis added). Here, Saylor could have 

seized Cooley, and searched his vehicle, had he been 

deputized to do so under Montana law, but this purely statelaw deficiency is irrelevant under Moore. The historical 

authorities on which the panel relies, which address searches 

and seizures outside an officer’s geographic territorial 

jurisdiction, see Cooley, 919 F.3d at 1145–47, bear no 

resemblance to the issue in this case.

The concurrence suggests that the distinction between 

lack of authorization and lack of territorial jurisdiction 

makes no sense, because even the defect in Henderson could 

be recast as a lack of authorization. See Concurrence at 10. 

The point is a bit ironic, because (as the panel notes in its 

opinion) that is essentially the reason that the Third and 

Tenth Circuits gave for declining to find that extraterritorial 

arrests in another state violate the Fourth Amendment. 

919 F.3d at 1147.9 For the panel to suggest a converse 

9 Thus, for example, the Tenth Circuit held that even geographically 

extraterritorial arrests by an officer do not violate the Fourth Amendment 

under Moore because the defect is merely the absence of authorization 

under the law of the neighboring state. See United States v. Jones, 

701 F.3d 1300, 1312 (10th Cir. 2012) (“In particular, we specifically 

reject Mr. Jones’s assertion that . . . ‘[w]hen a person is seized outside 

the state jurisdictional limit of a law enforcement officer who is acting 

without a warrant, that person’s Fourth Amendment constitutional right 

to be free from unreasonable seizures has been violated.’”). That broader 

question is not presented here, because Saylor did not act outside the 

geographic boundaries of the reservation. But the Tenth Circuit’s 

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 43 of 48
44 UNITED STATES V. COOLEY

rule—that every lack of authorization should be treated as 

equivalent to acting outside one’s territorial jurisdiction—

would be flatly contrary to Moore.

V

The fact that the panel’s decision conflicts with 

controlling Supreme Court and Ninth Circuit precedent, and 

with decisions of other appellate courts, is alone enough to 

warrant our rehearing this case en banc. See Fed. R. App. P. 

35(b)(1)(A). But the “exceptional importance” of the 

questions presented in this case provides yet an additional 

reason. See Fed. R. App. P. 35(b)(1)(B). Raising the bar for 

tribal investigations of non-Indian misconduct on fee lands 

from reasonable suspicion to “probable-cause-plus” is a very 

big deal, and one that literally may have life-or-death 

consequences for many of the hundreds of thousands of 

persons who live on Indian reservations located within this 

circuit. In particular, three factors underscore the significant 

practical importance of the issues raised by this case.

First, in many cases, the amount of reservation land that 

is held in fee by non-Indians (and thus covered by the panel’s 

rule) is high. For example, in Oliphant, the Court noted that, 

for the reservation at issue there, “approximately 63%” of 

the total acreage was “owned in fee simple absolute by nonIndians.” 435 U.S. at 193 n.1. The Court likewise noted in 

Montana that 28% of the land in the Crow Indian 

reservation—the one at issue in this case—was “held in fee 

by non-Indians.” Montana, 450 U.S. at 548.

decision in Jones underscores that the panel’s analysis reflects a circuit 

split on this point.

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 44 of 48
UNITED STATES V. COOLEY 45

Second, the number of non-Indians on reservations is 

also significant. According to the most recent census report, 

roughly 77 percent of the 4.6 million people who live in 

“American Indian areas” (which includes reservations, offreservation trust areas, and other tribal areas) are non-Indian. 

Tina Morris, Paula L. Vines, & Elizabeth M. Hoeffel, The 

American Indian and Alaska Native Population: 2010, U.S. 

Census Bureau 13–14 (2012), https://www.census.gov/

history/pdf/c2010br-10.pdf (last visited Jan. 13, 2020). 

Although the inclusion of non-reservation tribal areas in this 

statistic precludes directly extrapolating from that statistic 

the exact overall percentage of non-Indians on reservations, 

it nonetheless suggests that the number is not insignificant. 

Reservations appear to vary widely on this score: for the 

reservations in this circuit with the largest Indian 

populations, the percentage of non-Indians residing on the 

reservation ranges from a high of 68% on the Flathead 

Reservation in Montana to 1.2% on the Blackfeet 

Reservation in Montana. See id. at 14.

Third, the volume of criminal activity within reservation 

boundaries is in many cases higher than in other parts of the 

country. Indian reservations “experience violent crime rates 

two and a half times higher than the national average.” 

Kevin Morrow, Bridging the Jurisdictional Void: CrossDeputization Agreements in Indian Country, 94 N.D. L. Rev. 

65, 68 (2019). Traffic offenses are a serious issue, with the 

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluding that 

adult “motor vehicle-related death rates” for American 

Indians and Alaska Natives “are more than twice that of nonHispanic whites or blacks.” Tribal Road Safety: Get the 

Facts, Ctrs. for Disease Control & Prevention, 

https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/native/factsheet.ht

ml (last visited Jan. 12, 2020). “Alcohol-related offenses are 

exceptionally problematic on tribal lands.” Fresh Pursuit 

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 45 of 48
46 UNITED STATES V. COOLEY

from Indian Country: Tribal Authority to Pursue Suspects 

onto State Land, 129 Harv. L. Rev. 1685, 1690 (2016).

In light of these factors, the troubling consequence of the 

panel’s opinion will be that tribal law enforcement will be 

stripped of Terry-stop investigative authority with respect to 

a significant percentage (and in some cases a majority) of the 

people and land within their borders.10 Instead, tribal 

officers responding to disturbances on fee lands will be 

limited, in the case of non-Indians, to intervening only with 

respect to “obvious” or “apparent” crimes, or perhaps only 

with respect to felonies committed within the officer’s 

presence. Given the resulting practical significance to dayto-day maintenance of public order within this circuit’s 

many Indian reservations, the panel’s opinion in this case is 

as disturbing as it is mistaken.

Further, the practical problems created by the panel’s 

decision are unlikely to be resolved by other sources of law 

enforcement authority. In particular, states may not have the 

resources to adequately monitor, on their own, the state and 

federal highways that traverse Indian land. Montana’s 

eighth highway patrol district, for example, encompasses 

three of the state’s seven tribal reservations (the Blackfeet, 

Rocky Boy’s, and Fort Belknap Reservations), but is only 

policed by 17 full-time highway patrol officers as of 2018. 

See Mont. Highway Patrol, 2018 Annual Report 8, 

https://dojmt.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018-MHP-AR-for10 The concurrence uses three emphases to express its astonishment 

at the notion that “tribal police could stop, investigate, and detain known

non-Indians anywhere within the boundaries of a reservation for any

reasonably suspected crime.” Concurrence at 7–8. Of course, that is 

precisely what Ortiz-Barraza held and what has been the law in this 

circuit for more than four decades. The only thing that is astonishing is 

that the concurrence finds this astonishing.

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 46 of 48
UNITED STATES V. COOLEY 47

web.pdf (last visited Jan. 12, 2020); Mont. Governor’s Off. 

of Indian Aff., Tribal Nations, Montana.gov, 

https://tribalnations.mt.gov/tribalnations (last visited Jan. 

12, 2020). Unsurprisingly, it has been observed that “Tribal 

officers”—not state or county officers—“are often the first 

responders to investigate offenses that occur on the 

reservation, even if it is ultimately determined that 

jurisdiction lies in state or federal court.” State v. Kurtz, 

249 P.3d 1271, 1279 (Or. 2011).

Nor is cross-deputization a panacea to the problems 

wrongly created by the panel’s decision, because many 

tribes seem unwilling to make the trade-off inherent in such 

a relationship. For example, of the three Montana Indian 

reservations that rely predominantly on their own tribal law 

enforcement, apparently only one has a cross-deputization 

agreement. See District of Montana Indian Country Law 

Enforcement Initiative Operational Plan, The U.S. 

Attorney’s Office, District of Mont. 1, 7 (2016), 

https://www.justice.gov/usao-mt/page/file/934476/download

(last visited Jan. 12, 2020). More generally, “fifty-two tribes 

in the continental United States are unable to enforce state 

laws on their reservations without a specific local 

agreement.” Morrow, supra, 94 N.D. L. Rev. at 77. BIA 

law enforcement is likewise apparently not a cure-all: the 

Crow Tribe, which currently has a contract for lawenforcement services with the BIA, recently announced that, 

due to the perceived “ineffective police services” of the BIA, 

it is in the process of “transitioning” that contract “to the 

Crow Tribe Law Enforcement Department.” Crow Tribe of 

Indians, Press Release, Facebook (Nov. 20, 2019, 5:18 PM), 

https://www.facebook.com/OfficialCTINews/posts/forimmediate-releasenovember-20-2019press-release-crowagency-mt-the-crow-tribe/736936106823458/ (last visited, 

Jan. 12, 2020).

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 47 of 48
48 UNITED STATES V. COOLEY

By any definition, a legal issue of such potential practical 

significance to the safety and welfare of hundreds of 

thousands of our fellow citizens is exceptionally important.

I respectfully dissent from the denial of rehearing en 

banc.

Case: 17-30022, 01/24/2020, ID: 11572765, DktEntry: 57-1, Page 48 of 48