OKLAHOMA CITY – Death Row inmate Shaun Michael Bosse was wrongly convicted in a state district court, because his trial should have been held in federal court, a McClain County judge ruled Tuesday.
“...Congress established a reservation for the Chickasaw Nation, and Congress never specifically erased those boundaries and disestablished the reservation,” District Judge Leah Edwards wrote. Therefore, Bosse’s crimes “occurred in Indian Country” and he should have been prosecuted in federal district court, Edwards decreed.
A McClain County jury found Bosse guilty of killing a single mother and her two young children at their residence near Dibble on July 23, 2010.
Bosse was convicted on October 29, 2012, of three counts of first-degree murder and a charge of first-degree arson of the victims’ home. In accordance with the jury’s verdict, he was sentenced to death for the slayings plus 35 years in prison and a $25,000 fine for arson.
The sentence was imposed on December 18, 2012, and the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the conviction in October 2015.
Two years later Bosse appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to review his case, but the Justices denied his application.
Now Bosse, 37, wants his McClain County convictions vacated because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling July 9 in the case of child molester Jimcy McGirt.
In 1997 McGirt was convicted by a Wagoner County jury of first-degree rape by instrumentation, lewd molestation and forcible sodomy of a 4-year-old girl at a residence in that county, all after a former conviction in 1989 on two counts of forcible oral sodomy of two children in Oklahoma County.
In his appeal to the nation's highest court, McGirt’s attorney pointed out that his client is a citizen of the Seminole Nation and the alleged crimes in Wagoner County occurred at a residence within the boundaries of the Muscogee (Creek) tribal reservation. Therefore, he asserted, McGirt should have been prosecuted in federal court, and the Supreme Court agreed.
In its landmark 5-4 opinion July 9, the Court ruled that the Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s reservation was never disestablished by Congress. Therefore, the federal government has jurisdiction over major crimes involving Native Americans in the Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s historic reservation.
Consequently, McGirt, 71, was indicted August 17 in Muskogee’s Eastern District federal court on three counts of aggravated sexual abuse in “Indian Country”. His jury trial is scheduled for November 4, court records indicate.
STATE JUDGE RULES CHICKASAW RESERVATION NEVER DISESTABLISHED
In Bosse’s case, Judge Edwards decreed that:
• all three of the victims Bosse was convicted of killing had Indian blood and were on the tribal rolls of the Chickasaw Nation;
• those murders occurred in McClain County on property that lies inside the Chickasaw Nation Reservation; and’
• “[N]o evidence was presented to the Court to establish that Congress explicitly erased or disestablished the boundaries of the Chickasaw Nation or that the State of Oklahoma has jurisdiction of this matter.”
Edwards directed the McClain County Court Clerk to transmit the record of the evidentiary hearing and her “findings of fact and conclusions of law” to the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals.
Because of the McGirt decision, state authorities who file charges in state courts against Native Americans accused of committing serious crimes anywhere in Indian Country are being challenged to justify their decisions.
Questions are being posed whether the “same legal rationale” of McGirt applies in the other cases, such as Bosse’s, said Chris Wilson, first assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Oklahoma, based in Muskogee.
Bosse is a Caucasian but his three victims were Native Americans who were killed in Indian Country.
If Bosse’s state court conviction is dismissed by the state Court of Criminal Appeals and his case is removed to the Western District federal court in Oklahoma City, Bosse hopes the stiffest sentence he potentially could receive would be life imprisonment without possibility of parole.
Wilson confirmed to the Ledger on September 30 that in the federal judicial system, capital punishment cannot be imposed on a Native American convicted of committing a murder in Indian Country unless the tribe has ‘opted in’ to the death penalty. Of the 39 federally recognized tribes in Oklahoma, only the Sac & Fox Nation sanctions capital punishment, Wilson said.
Whether a white man such as Bosse could be executed for murdering a Native American in Indian Country has not yet been thoroughly researched, Wilson said.
Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter stated on an Oklahoma City television program July 11 that although the McGirt opinion “directly relates” to the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, “We think it applies to the other four tribes (Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole) eventually.”