Opinion ID: 719596
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Petitioners' Rights.

Text: 124 Petitioners claim that their liberty is restrained because the tribe threatens to remove them involuntarily from the tribe, their land, homes, and businesses, and to bar their return. Putting aside whether the threat of banishment is distinguishable from actual banishment, no one can discount the drastic impacts (cultural, economic, and social) that banishment and exclusion would have on one who has been a member of the Tonawanda Band. However, I think it is an error to measure the severity of the restraint by reference to the liberties enjoyed by the Tonawanda tribal community. There is of course no doubt that the petitioners, if banished, will lose all the rights conferred by the tribal sovereignty. But the proper inquiry is whether the petitioners, if banished, will suffer a severe impairment of the liberties that are enjoyed by the American public at large. 125 The applicable principle is that habeas corpus responds to restraints that are not shared by the public generally. Hensley, 411 U.S. at 351, 93 S.Ct. at 1575 (quoting Jones v. Cunningham, 371 U.S. 236, 240, 83 S.Ct. 373, 376, 9 L.Ed.2d 285 (1963)). Section 1303 is no different in this respect. It grants any person the right to challenge through habeas corpus any detention by an Indian tribe. The term any person, which obviously includes members of Indian tribes, applies just as clearly to non-tribal Americans and to anyone else in the country. Since any person may seek relief from a severe restraint on liberty imposed by an Indian tribe, it follows that the restraints contemplated by the statute, and remediable by a writ of habeas corpus, are restraints on the liberties ordinarily enjoyed by any person and not solely or even especially by members of the Indian tribes. 126 What restraints will be brought to bear upon the petitioners after they are banished from the Tonawanda Band and its reservation? What liberties will they thereby lose? Natural born members of the Tonawanda Band are citizens of the United States. 8 U.S.C. § 1401(b). Once they exit the reservation, petitioners will be free to settle and travel where they wish, and to come and go as they please, in the same way and to the same extent as any other person in the United States. Although that freedom does not confer a right to settle or trespass on private lands, or on lands reserved to any Indian nation, the petitioners' constitutional rights will in no way be diminished after banishment; indeed, they will then enjoy important constitutional rights that are not guaranteed by the ICRA on the Tonawanda reservation. For example, a tribe may establish a religion, need not provide jury trials in civil cases, need not appoint counsel to indigent criminal defendants, and is not required to initiate criminal prosecutions by grand jury indictment. See Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, 436 U.S. 49, 63 & n. 14, 98 S.Ct. 1670, 1679 & n. 14, 56 L.Ed.2d 106 (1978) (discussing ICRA's selective incorporation of provisions of the Bill of Rights). 127 The petitioners analogize banishment to alien exclusion, deportation, denaturalization or denationalization, and rely upon lines of cases holding that those deprivations support issuance of the writ. Banishment from an Indian nation differs in some critical respects from the loss of rights faced by persons facing shipment abroad or a loss of citizenship that prefigures exile. One who is excluded or deported from the United States may go to a native and congenial country that guarantees every essential liberty; nevertheless, that departure means the loss of the liberties enjoyed by the general populace of the United States, and it is that loss of rights that conceptually justifies habeas relief from our courts. This view is entirely consistent with the observation in Jones v. Cunningham that habeas corpus is available to an alien seeking entry into the United States, although in those cases each alien was free to go anywhere else in the world. 371 U.S. at 239, 83 S.Ct. at 375 (footnote omitted). 128 There are additional reasons why the habeas rights of excluded aliens offer no analogy useful to petitioners. First, an excluded alien's right to invoke habeas corpus is a specific statutory right conferred by Congress. See 8 U.S.C. § 1105a(b) ([A]ny alien against whom a final order of exclusion has been made ... may obtain judicial review of such order by habeas corpus proceedings....). Second, the Supreme Court in Brownell v. We Shung, 352 U.S. 180, 183, 77 S.Ct. 252, 255, 1 L.Ed.2d 225 (1956)--one of the precedents cited in Jones--confirmed that any excluded alien seeking habeas corpus must still be detained or at the least be in technical custody. Id. The excluded alien cases therefore do not expand the meaning of the term custody for purposes of habeas corpus jurisdiction; they merely affirm the well settled rule that [w]hatever the procedure authorized by Congress is, it is due process as far as an alien denied entry is concerned. Shaughnessy v. United States ex rel. Mezei, 345 U.S. 206, 212, 73 S.Ct. 625, 629, 97 L.Ed. 956 (1953) (quoting United States ex rel. Knauff v. Shaughnessy, 338 U.S. 537, 544, 70 S.Ct. 309, 313, 94 L.Ed. 317 (1950)). 129 Petitioners' reliance on deportation cases is misplaced for all the same reasons. Deportation separates the individual from the rights and liberties enjoyed by the American populace at large. The availability of habeas corpus relief in deportation cases is also a matter of statutory law. 8 U.S.C. 1105a(a)(10) ([A]ny alien held in custody pursuant to an order of deportation may obtain judicial review thereof by habeas corpus proceedings.). Moreover, in creating this remedy, Congress provided (without elaboration) that the petitioning alien must be in custody to invoke section 1105a(a)(10). See id. The deportation statute therefore does not weaken or modify the usual requisite of habeas corpus jurisprudence that the petitioner show a restraint on liberty. 130 Similarly, the Supreme Court has held that denationalization violates the Eighth Amendment because it strips an individual of the right to have rights and raises the threat of banishment from all of the United States. Trop v. Dulles, 356 U.S. 86, 101-02, 78 S.Ct. 590, 598, 2 L.Ed.2d 630 (1958). Banishment is therefore a severe restraint on the liberty of one who is banished from the United States or excluded from some place within the United States that the general population has the right to be. Doubtless, petitioners could plausibly claim a severe restraint on liberty if they were facing banishment to the Tonawanda reservation. 1 But I do not see how banishment from the Indian reservation supports habeas relief. In terms of our habeas corpus jurisdiction, banishment to the United States is a meaningless concept. 131 The majority opinion points out that the petitioners are complaining about several forms of restraint, of which banishment is only one, and enumerates them. In my view, these do not add up to the requisite severe restraint on liberty. Thus, the respondents attempted (without success) to take petitioners ... into custody and eject them. Maj. Op. at 878. From this allegation it appears that the petitioners have not been taken into custody, and that the effort to lay hands on them was for the sole purpose of releasing them outside the reservation, not to detain them on it. Other alleged deprivations--the continue[d][ ] harass[ment] and assault, id. at 878, the stoning of petitioner Peters, id., the deni[al of] electrical service to their homes and businesses, id. at 878, 895, the instruction that petitioners' names be removed from the list of eligible clients of the reservation clinic, id. at 878, and a continuing supervision (which seems to be no more than a hostile observation), id. at 895--do not amount to restraints of the person, and cannot very well be remedied by a writ of habeas corpus. Certainly, the writ of habeas corpus is an ill-adapted device for regulating utility services or clinic privileges. 132 The order of banishment itself, set forth in the majority opinion, recites the particular deprivations allegedly imposed. See Maj. Op. at 878. In addition to banishment, the petitioners' lands will become the responsibility of the Council of Chiefs, petitioners will suffer loss of their tribal names, citizenship, and rights of membership, and their names will be removed from the tribal rolls. Do any of these deprivations justify issuance of the writ? 133 It was undisputed at oral argument that the lands at issue are tribal lands allotted by the tribe but not owned by the individual members. It has long been settled that 134 the powers of an Indian tribe with respect to tribal land are not limited by any rights of occupancy which the tribe itself may grant to its members, that occupancy of tribal land does not create any vested rights in the occupant as against the tribe, and that the extent of any individual's interest in tribal property is subject to such limitations as the tribe may see fit to impose. 135 Felix S. Cohen, Handbook of Federal Indian Law 144 (1941) (footnotes omitted). See Wilson v. Omaha Indian Tribe, 442 U.S. 653, 665, 99 S.Ct. 2529, 2536-37, 61 L.Ed.2d 153 (1979) (Whatever title [in tribal land] the Indians have is in the tribe, and not in the individuals, although held by the tribe for the common use and equal benefit of all the members. (internal quotation marks and citations omitted)); Crowe v. Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, Inc., 506 F.2d 1231, 1235 (4th Cir.1974) (There can be no individual ownership of tribal land and the individual's right of use depends upon tribal law or custom.); Northern Cheyenne Tribe v. Northern Cheyenne Defendant Class of Allottees, Heirs, & Devisees, 505 F.2d 268, 273 (9th Cir.1974) ([S]o long as the land remains tribal in character the individual Indian has no vested right, as against the tribe, to any specific part of the tribal property.), rev'd on other grounds, 425 U.S. 649, 96 S.Ct. 1793, 48 L.Ed.2d 274 (1976). 136 Off the reservation, each petitioner has the right to use his tribal name or any other name he wishes (other than one selected to defraud creditors), and the tribe's banishment order cannot prevent him from doing so. On the reservation, the other members may refuse to utter the petitioners' tribal names, and a writ of habeas corpus (assuming jurisdiction to issue one) cannot force them to use those names. As to citizenship and rights of membership, I believe that the tribe has sovereign power to determine its membership, for the reasons stated in section B, infra. And as to the tribal rolls: to the extent that the rolls merely reflect the tribe's own membership decisions, the addition or removal of names seems to be a function of the tribe's undoubted power to make that determination. To the extent that rolls are maintained to determine entitlement to federal payments or federally controlled funds, the rolls are maintained by the Secretary of the Interior rather than by the tribe. 25 U.S.C. § 163. 137