LAWTON – Appeals citing the U.S. Supreme Court decision last year in McGirt v. Oklahoma have been filed in Comanche County District Court in several cases in which Native Americans were convicted of major crimes committed on land identified as the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache reservation in southwestern Oklahoma.
Two of those are Joshua Tony Codynah and Mica Alexander Martinez, who were convicted of murder. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals remanded their cases to Comanche County last September for the district court to determine whether the defendants are indeed Native Americans and whether the crimes of which they were convicted occurred in Indian Country.
Codynah, 32, a member of the Kiowa Tribe, pleaded guilty in September 2017 to first-degree murder, first-degree burglary, child neglect – exposure to illegal activities, and assault and battery with a deadly weapon.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder and 15 years in prison for assault and battery with a deadly weapon, sentences to run consecutively, plus 20 years suspended for burglary and child neglect, to run concurrently to each other but consecutively after the murder and assault sentences.
Martinez, 40, a member of the Comanche Tribe, was convicted in 2013 of first-degree murder in the beating deaths of Carl and Martha Faye Miller during an attack that occurred at their residence in Cache on October 12, 2009. He received two death sentences for the slayings and a 10-year sentence for assault and battery with a dangerous weapon.
District Judge Emmit Tayloe conducted an evidentiary hearing March 12 on their appeals.
Both the prosecution and the defense concurred that evidence was presented confirming that both men are recognized as tribal members and the crimes for which they were convicted occurred in “Indian country”. What remains uncertain is the status of the KCA Reservation.
Attorneys for Martinez and Codynah maintain that the KCA Reservation encompasses seven counties, “including the entirety of Comanche County,” and has never been dissolved by Congress. Oklahoma Attorney General Hunter disagreed and cited the Congressional Record in his legal brief to the court.
In 1900 the Kiowa, Comanche and Apache Tribes agreed to “cede, convey, transfer, relinquish, and surrender, forever and absolutely, without any reservation whatever, express or implied, all their lands...” and to “abandon” said lands, Hunter wrote. “This is exactly the kind of explicit language the Supreme Court in McGirt required to show disestablishment of a reservation...”
In McGirt, the Supreme Court held that “[t]o determine whether a tribe continues to hold a reservation, there is only one place we may look: the Acts of Congress.”
Hunter cites an Act of Congress dated June 6, 1900.
“The land described as ceded in the 1900 Act is the same geographic description contained in Article II” of the First Treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek, dated October 21, 1867, which created a reservation for the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache Tribes. That land constitutes “the entire reservation,” he wrote.
The United States agreed to pay the tribes $2 million for the “cession of territory and relinquishment of title, claim, and interest in and to the lands as aforesaid...” The Act also refers to the land as being “abandoned by said Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache tribes...”
Hunter wrote that the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals held that the 1900 Act “disestablished the organized reservation” and that the reservation was “dissolved”.
The Attorney General also noted that Comanche County District Judge Scott Meaders ruled two years ago, in an appeal from a man who pleaded guilty in 2005 to armed robbery of a Lawton restaurant and was sentenced to 20 years in prison, that the KCA reservation was disestablished.
Judge Tayloe said March 19 that since a jury docket is scheduled to begin soon, he doesn’t expect to render his decision until sometime in April.