OKLAHOMA CITY — Although the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in McGirt vs Oklahoma resulted in most of the eastern half of the state being considered “Indian Country” for purposes of criminal jurisdiction, the same cannot be said of western Oklahoma.
Seven decades before the McGirt decision was issued on July 9, 2020, the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that an agreement approved in 1900 disestablished the Kiowa Comanche Apache Reservation in Southwest Oklahoma.
That issue arose again when Charles Benjamin Killsfirst, 52, attempted to have his convictions in Comanche County overturned by the state Court of Criminal Appeals.
Arrested by the Lawton Police Department in 2017, Killsfirst was convicted in 2018 of first-degree burglary after prior convictions of two or more felonies, and misdemeanor charges of outraging public decency and assault and battery. Comanche County District Judge Emmit Tayloe sentenced Killsfirst to 30 years in prison, with 15 years suspended. He is incarcerated at the Granite Reformatory, state Corrections Department records show.
Killsfirst filed an appeal in early 2020, arguing that his crimes occurred within the boundaries of the KCA reservation and he is a Native American; consequently, the State of Oklahoma had no authority to prosecute him. Killsfirst also claimed he was “voluntarily intoxicated and therefore could not have formed the specific intent” required to sustain charges of being naked during the first-degree burglary of an occupied residence.
The First and Second Medicine Lodge Treaties of 1867 reserved a large expanse of southwest Oklahoma for the KCA tribes, including western parts of present-day Jefferson, Stephens and Grady counties, a southern part of present-day Caddo County, and all of present-day Comanche, Cotton, Kiowa and Tillman counties.
However, Congress dissolved the KCA tribal reservation by an Act dated June 6, 1900, the 10th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled 71 years ago, in 1950, in the case of a full-blood Apache man who was accused of murdering a full-blood Comanche woman in Caddo County.
The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals ruled similarly in 1960 in a case from Comanche County where a man convicted eight years earlier of first-degree manslaughter was sentenced to 49 years in prison. The state court cited the 10th Circuit opinion in its ruling.
Consequently, Comanche County “is not within the boundaries of an existing reservation and thus is not Indian Country,” the state appellate court ruled in denying Killsfirst’s appeal on January 13.
Killsfirst was convicted in Cotton County of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and served eight years in prison, 2004-12. He also served 18 months, January 2000 to June 2001, for a Cotton County conviction of escape from confinement.
He served prison terms in 1992, 1996, and 1998-2001, for convictions in Comanche County on charges of DUI-being in actual physical control of a motor vehicle, court records show.
Records also indicate Killsfirst served a one-year county jail sentence for convictions in 2003 in Cotton County for disturbing the peace and escape from detention. He was convicted in Cotton County again in 2014 of disturbing the peace, along with two counts of public intoxication, threatening to perform an act of violence, and obstructing a law enforcement officer.
Okmulgee convict’s appeal also rejected
Another Native American convicted in Comanche County also has struck out with the courts.
Kenneth Lee Camp, 41, of Okmulgee, pleaded guilty in Comanche County District Court in 2019 to a felony charge of committing aggravated assault and battery at the GEO correctional center at Lawton in 2017. Judge Tayloe imposed a seven-year prison sentence, to be tacked onto a five-year sentence Camp received in Atoka County on a 2015 guilty plea to possession of contraband while incarcerated at the Mack Alford Correctional Center.
Camp produced a document showing that he has a one-quarter Creek Indian blood quantum. Consequently, his attorney filed motions in 2020 to have his convictions in Comanche, Atoka, Adair and Okmulgee counties set aside because Camp is a Native American who was convicted in state courts that “lack subject-matter jurisdiction” because his crimes occurred in “Indian Country.” However, his attorney dismissed that application a month later.
Camp was among 43 incarcerated Native Americans who petitioned the Oklahoma Supreme Court in March 2021 to assume original jurisdiction in their cases; they complained of a “conflict in jurisdiction regarding ‘Indian Country’…” Ten days after listening to oral arguments, the Supreme Court denied the application. No explanation appears in the court record.
Subsequently Camp filed an application in Comanche County District Court for post-conviction relief, but Tayloe denied it on June 11, 2021.
In 2003 Camp was convicted of robbery in Adair County, and in 2005 he was convicted in Adair County of aggravated assault and battery on a police officer.
In Okmulgee County he pleaded guilty in 2010 to possession of a controlled dangerous substance and of drug paraphernalia; admitted in 2014 he was in possession of a firearm after former conviction of a felony; and pleaded guilty in 2015 to misdemeanor destruction of evidence and of bringing contraband into a place where prisoners are kept, a felony.
Killer’s appeal spurned by state appellate court
The state Court of Criminal Appeals denied a McGirt-related appeal from Mica Alexander Martinez, 41, on Dec. 30.
He was convicted in 2013 in Comanche County of first-degree murder in the 2009 beating deaths of Carl and Martha Faye Miller during an attack that occurred at their residence in Cache. Martinez received two death sentences for the slayings and a 10-year sentence for assault and battery with a dangerous weapon.
Martinez has a 1/4 Comanche blood quantum and was recognized as a citizen of the Comanche Nation in 2009.
Nevertheless, the Court of Criminal Appeals denied Martinez’s first and second applications for post-conviction relief, in 2013 and again in 2017. And his convictions and sentences became final on Oct. 31, 2016, when the U.S. Supreme Court denied his petition asking the justices to review the decision, the state Court of Criminal Appeals decreed.