The US Supreme Court has ruled 5-4 in favor of Clayvin Herrera, a member of the Crow tribe, who shot elk in the Bighorn National Forest in the state of Wyoming in January 2014.

"The Crow tribe's hunting right survived Wyoming's statehood, and the lands within Bighorn National Forest did not become categorically 'occupied' when set aside as a national reserve," the court in Washington ruled on Monday.

Herrera had been prosecuted by courts in Wyoming for off-season hunting, and hunting without a license. He was fined $8,000 (€7,100).

Prosecutors had argued that the rights of the Crow tribe to hunt in Wyoming expired when the area became a state in 1890.

But Herrera's lawyers said that the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie gave members of the tribe the right to hunt in both Montana and Wyoming, including on the land which became Wyoming's Bighorn National Forest.

The four liberal members of the Supreme Court were joined by conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch on Monday as they ruled in Herrera's favor.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Montana (ACLU) said the decision was important not just for tribes in Wyoming and Montana: "This ruling is a huge win for Clayvin Herrera, the Crow Tribe, and tribes across the country that entered into treaties with the federal government," the ACLU's Lillian Alvernaz said in a statement.

"On a practical level, this means that members of the Crow Tribe can continue to hunt on unoccupied lands like the Bighorn National Forest to provide sustenance for their families and children," Alvernaz said. "More broadly, through this decision, the Supreme Court held the federal government accountable to its treaty obligations and affirmed tribal sovereignty."

The question of the fine imposed remains moot. The court sent that case back to the lower courts allowing the court to argue it could regulate hunting by Crow tribe members, if it was necessary for wildlife conservation.

It was not immediately clear if Wyoming would pursue the case.

Every evening, DW sends out a selection of the day's news and features. Sign up here. </s> The US Supreme Court sided with a Native American elk hunter on Monday — ruling in favor of tribal rights and the legal hunting of animals on “unoccupied” land.

The high court cited an 1868 treaty between Crow Tribe members and the US government, which allowed tribe members to hunt in areas where people aren’t living. They ruled 5-4 in favor of the elk hunter, Clayvin Herrera.

Described as a Crow Tribe member from Wyoming, Herrera was busted hunting bull elk out of season in the Bighorn National Forest in 2014. He was later convicted of hunting without a state license, fined, and banned from hunting for three years.

The conviction was upheld in 2017 by an intermediate Wyoming appeals court and left in place by the state’s supreme court.

The treaty that was cited in Monday’s decision was actually signed before Wyoming became a US state in 1890, but that didn’t stop conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch from siding with the high court’s four liberals. It’s the second ruling to be made in favor of tribal rights in the past two months.

“We are gratified that the Supreme Court held that the treaty hunting right guaranteed to the Crow Tribe,” said Herrera’s lawyer, George Hicks, “and Mr. Herrera was not abrogated by Wyoming’s admission to the union or the creation of the Bighorn National Forest.”

While the decision is a big win for Herrera, his conviction will not be immediately voided.

The state of Wyoming could still come forward with evidence and claim that the land where Herrera hunted is not “unoccupied,” but it has previously failed to do so. The Supreme Court argued in its ruling that treaty rights don’t just go away once a territory becomes a state.

“Despite the apparent importance of the hunting right to the negotiations, Wyoming points to no evidence that federal negotiators ever proposed that the right would end at statehood,” wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “This silence is especially telling.” </s> WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court on Monday sided with a member of the Crow tribe who was fined for hunting elk in Wyoming's Bighorn National Forest, giving him a good chance to get a more than $8,000 fine against him overturned.

The 5-4 decision from the justices is a win for Clayvin Herrera and his tribe, which had argued they had hunting rights in the forest.

Herrera's case began in 2014 when he went hunting with family. The group began on the Crow tribe's reservation in southern Montana but crossed into the neighboring Bighorn National Forest in Wyoming, where they killed several elk.

Soon after, a game warden saw photos Herrera posted on a bragging website for hunters, including one of him crouched in the snow behind an elk he shot and another with its antlers balanced on his shoulders. The game warden ultimately identified the area where the photos were taken in the Bighorn National Forest, and Herrera was cited for killing an elk there during the winter, when it is prohibited.

But Herrera, backed by the federal government, argued that when his tribe gave up land in present-day Montana and Wyoming under an 1868 treaty, the tribe retained the right to hunt on the land, including land that became Wyoming's Bighorn National Forest.

The state of Wyoming had argued that the Crow tribe's hunting rights ceased to exist after Wyoming became a state in 1890 or after Bighorn National Forest was established in 1897. But the Supreme Court disagreed, with Justice Neil Gorsuch joining his four liberal colleagues -- justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan -- in ruling for Herrera.

The court's four other justices said they would have ruled that a prior case settled that Crow tribe members like Herrera don't have an unrestricted right to hunt and fish in the Bighorn National Forest and are subject to the game laws of Wyoming.

The ruling does not immediately resolve the issue of Herrera's fine. The Supreme Court said in sending the case back to lower courts that the state can argue that it can regulate hunting by Crow tribe members if it is necessary for wildlife conservation. The state can also try to argue that the tribe's treaty rights didn't extend to the specific area of Bighorn National Forest where he was hunting. But Herrera's lawyers have argued that the location where he was hunting was covered by the treaty and have said data shows that elk are overpopulated in the state.

The state can pursue the case or drop it. In a statement, Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon noted that there are outstanding issues in the case which Wyoming courts will resolve. He said his administration will "stand up for a system that preserves the decades of conservation work that has built a strong wildlife population in the Bighorns" and "work to find solutions for all those who hunt."

George Hicks, an attorney for Herrera, said in a statement that his lawyers are gratified by the court's ruling.

Information for this article was contributed by Mead Gruver of The Associated Press. </s> FILE PHOTO: A bull elk with velvet still on it's antlers grazes near Madison in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, June 19, 2011. REUTERS/Jim Urquhart/File Photo

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Supreme Court on Monday ruled in favor of a Native American elk hunter, citing an 1868 treaty between his tribe and the U.S. government as it revived his legal challenge to a conviction for hunting out of season in Bighorn National Forest in Wyoming.

In a 5-4 ruling, the high court sided with Crow Tribe member Clayvin Herrera. It found that the treaty, which gave tribe members hunting rights on “unoccupied” lands, is still in force even though it was signed before Wyoming became a U.S. state in 1890.

Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, who has a record of backing tribal rights, sided with the court’s four liberals, with the other four conservative justices in dissent. The same lineup voted in favor of tribal rights in a previous case this term, ruling that members of the Yakima Nation did not have to pay taxes for importing fuel into Washington state.

Monday’s ruling does not immediately void Herrera’s conviction because the state can still argue that the Bighorn National Forest location where he and others hunted bull elk in 2014 is not “unoccupied,” meaning he would not have been able to legally hunt there.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the court, said treaty rights do not automatically disappear when a territory becomes a state. Sotomayor cited historical evidence that the Crow Tribe made a high priority of hunting rights during its treaty negotiations with the government.

“Yet despite the apparent importance of the hunting right to the negotiations, Wyoming points to no evidence that federal negotiators ever proposed that the right would end at statehood,” Sotomayor wrote. “This silence is especially telling.”

Herrera, who is from Montana, was charged with hunting elk off-season or without a state hunting license. He was convicted and received a suspended prison sentence, a fine and a three-year hunting ban. An intermediate Wyoming appeals court upheld the conviction in 2017 and the state’s Supreme Court left that ruling in place.

“We are gratified that the Supreme Court held that the treaty hunting right guaranteed to the Crow Tribe and Mr. Herrera was not abrogated by Wyoming’s admission to the union or the creation of the Bighorn National Forest,” Herrera’s lawyer, George Hicks, said in a statement.

It marked the court’s second ruling in favor of a hunter in the past two months. The court ruled in March that the federal government could not prevent an Alaskan man from riding his hovercraft on a river through territory overseen by the National Park Service to reach remote moose-hunting grounds in the northernmost U.S. state. </s> The Supreme Court is siding with a member of the Crow tribe who was fined for hunting elk in Wyoming's Bighorn National Forest.

The Supreme Court on Monday sided with Clayvin Herrera. He argued that when his tribe gave up land in present-day Montana and Wyoming to the federal government in 1868, the tribe retained the right to hunt on the land.

The justices rejected Wyoming's argument that the Crow tribe's hunting rights ceased to exist after Wyoming became a state in 1890 or after Bighorn National Forest was established in 1897.

Herrera wound up with a fine of more than $8,000 after he posted photos online of his kill. </s> DNY59/iStock(WASHINGTON) — A Native American hunter from Montana won his case at the Supreme Court on Monday, solidifying treaty rights for the Crow Tribe and overturning a state fine for poaching.

In a 5-4 decision, the court sided with Clayvin Herrera in his appeal of an $8000 fine from Wyoming in 2014 for hunting elk off-season, without a license in the state’s Bighorn National Forest.

The decision clarifies court precedent that historical treaty rights between the U.S. government and Native American tribes did not implicitly end when a territory became a state.

Herrera argued that an 1868 treaty between his tribe and the federal government explicitly protected a right to hunt on “unoccupied lands” at any time. Wyoming claimed that the right disappeared when the state entered the union, and when the federal forest land was designated, making it “occupied.”

“We disagree,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote of Wyoming’s argument in the majority opinion. “The Crow Tribe’s hunting right survived Wyoming’s statehood, and the lands within Bighorn National Forest did not become categorically ‘occupied’ when set aside as a national reserve.”

Sotomayor, who was joined on the opinion by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch, invoked the court’s precedent that “Congress must clearly express any intent to abrogate Indian treaty rights.”

“First, the Wyoming Statehood Act does not show that Congress intended to end the 1868 Treaty hunting right,” Sotomayor writes. “Nor is there any evidence in the treaty itself that Congress intended the hunting right to expire at statehood, or that the Crow Tribe would have understood it to do so.”

As for whether a national forest constitutes “occupied” land, the majority wrote that the reserve could not be categorically considered such. But they left open the door for Wyoming to argue in lower court that a narrowly defined area in which Herrera was hunting was in fact occupied.

In a dissent, Justices Samuel Alito, John Roberts, Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh called the majority’s reasoning “plainly contrary” to two Supreme Court precedents: an 1896 case which suggested that some Indian treaty rights extinguished with statehood, and a 1995 case which said Crow hunting rights had lapsed.

“This interpretation of the treaty is debatable,” Alito wrote of the majority decision. “Even if the court’s interpretation of the treaty is correct, its decision will have no effect if the members of the Crow Tribe are bound under the… holding that the hunting right conferred by that treaty is no longer in force.”

The majority concluded that a 1999 Native American treaty-rights case “repudiated” and “undercut” the reasoning in the earlier decisions from 1896 and 1995. </s> The US Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Native American man on Monday in a case involving hunting rights for the Crow Tribe.

The nation's highest court, in a 5-4 decision, found that hunting rights extended to the tribe in an 1868 treaty did not expire after Wyoming became a state.

The case stemmed from the prosecution of Clayvin Herrera, a member of the Crow tribe, for off-season hunting and hunting without a license in the Bighorn National Forest in Wyoming.

During a January 2014 hunt, Herrera and several tribe members shot an elk in the forest in Wyoming, across the border from the Crow reservation in the neighboring state of Montana.

Prosecutors had argued -- and Wyoming courts had agreed -- that the tribe's Wyoming hunting rights expired with statehood in 1890.

Herrera's lawyers argued that the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie gave members of the tribe the right to hunt in both Montana and Wyoming.

The Supreme Court agreed, with conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch providing the decisive vote by joining the four liberal members of the court.

Gorsuch is the only member of the top court from the western United States and has been sympathetic to Native American rights in the past.

"The Crow Tribe's hunting right survived Wyoming's statehood, and the lands within Bighorn National Forest did not become categorically 'occupied' when set aside as a national reserve," the court said.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Montana welcomed the decision.

"This ruling is a huge win for Clayvin Herrera, the Crow Tribe, and tribes across the country that entered into treaties with the federal government," the ACLU's Lillian Alvernaz said in a statement.

"On a practical level, this means that members of the Crow Tribe can continue to hunt on unoccupied lands like the Bighorn National Forest to provide sustenance for their families and children.

"This is especially important for the well-being and health of the Tribe because access to healthy food on the reservation is limited," Alvernaz said.

"More broadly, through this decision, the Supreme Court held the federal government accountable to its treaty obligations and affirmed tribal sovereignty." </s> One of President Trump’s nominees sided Monday with the liberal wing of the Supreme Court for the second time in two weeks, as Justice Neil Gorsuch joined a narrow majority in support of a Native American man convicted for hunting in a national forest.

The case, Herrera v. Wyoming, deals with a treaty from 1868 which allowed members of the tribe to hunt in “unoccupied lands” in the U.S. in exchange for their land, which went on to become part of Wyoming and Montana. At issue was whether the hunting rights in the treaty are still in effect or were nullified when Wyoming became a state in 1890.

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The opinion by Justice Sonia Sotomayor – and joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer, and Gorsuch – ruled that the treaty indeed still applies, and that Crow member Clayvin Herrera was improperly convicted of off-season hunting in Bighorn National Forest in 2014.

The court’s 5-4 ruling, which vacated the decision from the state appellate court, is based on the 1999 decision in Minnesota v. Mille Lacs Band of Chippewa Indians. In that case, the Supreme Court said that a territory gaining statehood is not enough “to extinguish Indian treaty rights to hunt, fish, and gather on land within state boundaries.” The court went further in that case, stating that Congress “must clearly express” an intention to end a treaty with a Native American tribe in order for the treaty’s rights to expire.

By siding with the traditionally liberal justices, Gorsuch gave them a 5-4 majority in the case.

The opinion came exactly one week after Trump’s other nominee, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, sided with liberals in a 5-4 decision that he wrote, ruling that Apple could be sued by iPhone owners over high prices in their App Store.

Sotomayor, in the latest opinion, also addressed the argument that the land on which Hererra was hunting became “occupied” under the treaty when it became a national forest in 1897. The court’s decision said that while it is possible that certain areas of the forest could be considered occupied, the forest as a whole is not occupied by default simply because it is a national forest.

Hererra’s attorney, George W. Hicks, celebrated his client’s victory. “We are gratified that the Supreme Court held that the treaty hunting right guaranteed to the Crow Tribe and Mr. Herrera was not abrogated by Wyoming’s admission to the Union or the creation of the Bighorn National Forest,” he said in a statement to Fox News.

Gorsuch’s conservative colleagues, led by Justice Samuel Alito, argued in a dissenting opinion that the majority has it all wrong. Alito, like the lower court’s decision, relied on an 1896 case involving a similarly worded treaty between Wyoming and the Shoshonee and Bannack tribes, which also was from 1868. That case, Ward v. Race Horse, said that when Wyoming became a state, it ended the treaty. This ruling was based on the idea that states have the authority “to regulate the killing of game within their borders.”

Additionally, the conservative dissent said that a 1995 10th Circuit opinion in Crow Tribe of Indians v. Repsis dealt with the exact issue in Hererra’s case, relying on the precedent in Race Horse to say that the Crow Tribe’s hunting rights under their treaty expired when Wyoming became a state. Because the issue was already decided in that case, the dissent said, it was improper for it to be heard again here.

The majority opinion addressed the Race Horse and Repsis cases, stating that the more recent 1999 Mille Lacs case renders them obsolete. Sotomayor also wrote that it did not matter that the same treaty had been addressed in the past, because the Mille Lacs case represented a "change in [the] applicable legal context." The conservatives disagreed. </s> The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Native American rights in a 5-4 decision in a case out of Wyoming. Justice Gorsuch provided the decisive vote in this case, showing himself again, as a Coloradan, to be sensitive to Native American rights.

The court held that hunting rights for the Crow tribe under a 19th Century treaty did not expire when Wyoming became a state. This case centered on a member of the tribe, Clayvin Herrera, who faced charges for off-season hunting in Bighorn National Forest in Wyoming.

There isn't "any evidence in the treaty itself that Congress intended the hunting right to expire at statehood, or that the Crow Tribe would have understood it to do so," Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the majority.

Gorsuch also provided the fifth vote in another American Indian treaty case dealing with the "Yakama Tribe and its right under an 1855 treaty to travel the public roads without being taxed on the goods brought to the reservation," as NPR's Nina Totenberg wrote in March.

More context: "For those familiar with Gorsuch's record, his vote was not a surprise. He is, after all, the only westerner on the Supreme Court; indeed, prior to his 2017 appointment to the court, he served for 11 years on the federal court of appeals based in Denver — a court that covers six states and encompasses 76 recognized Indian tribes."

There is another major decision coming from the court out of Oklahoma dealing with Native American rights — Carpenter v. Murphy — but Gorsuch is recused from that case, meaning it could result in a deadlock.
The U.S. Supreme Court in Herrera v. Wyoming rules in favor of a Native American elk hunter from Montana who was convicted for hunting off-season in Bighorn National Forest, deciding that the 1868 federal treaty between the Crow Nation and the U.S. Government is still in force even after Wyoming became a state in 1890. The treaty gave tribe members hunting rights on "unoccupied" lands.