MUSKOGEE – Jimcy McGirt, whose handwritten petition for post-conviction relief led to a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that overturned more than a century of jurisprudence in Oklahoma, pleaded guilty recently to a single criminal charge of failure to register as a sex offender.
McGirt, 76, of Wewoka, was released from prison 14 months ago after serving 26 years for aggravated sexual abuse of a child in Indian Country.
He was indicted in Muskogee’s Eastern District federal court on April 9, 2025, on four charges.
• Count 1: “knowingly” failing to register as a sex offender “as required by the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act” during a one-week period: August 25-31, 2024.
• Count 2: failing to register as a sex offender and update his registration while “residing in a home with a minor child and failing to contact the Oklahoma Department of Human Services statewide hotline to report the name and date of birth of all minor children residing in” that household.
• Count 3: failure to register as a sex offender while “residing in a home, either temporarily or permanently, within a 2,000-foot radius of any playground or park.”
• Count 4: failure to register as a sex offender between June 14 and “August 31, 2024, and failure to “register an electronic email address and social networking site” in violation of federal law.
The charges arose from an investigation by the U.S. Marshals Service.
McGirt submitted to the court a petition to plead guilty to Count 3 on June 24. A U.S. District Court judge in Oklahoma’s Eastern District will determine the sentence to be imposed after considering federal sentencing guidelines and other statutory factors.
McGirt will remain in the custody of the Marshals Service pending sentencing.
Judge John F. Heil III, of Oklahoma’s Eastern District federal court in Muskogee, signed off May 2, 2024, on a plea agreement federal prosecutors reached with McGirt’s legal advisers, Rex Earl Starr of Stilwell and Richard O’Carroll of Tulsa.
McGirt, formerly of Holdenville, pleaded guilty in late 2023 to one felony abuse charge and two other counts were dismissed. Accordingly, Heil sentenced McGirt to 360 months – 30 years – in federal prison.
However, in a document filed in federal court last December, McGirt was advised by one of his attorneys that, “According to BOP [Bureau of Prisons], this deal allows for credit for time served and, based upon my research, in my opinion you have already discharged 30 years.”
He will be on probation for four more years, must register as a sex offender, and is forbidden from having any contact with his victim, who is now an adult.
Although McGirt’s whereabouts were not known initially, a sentencing memo in the court record indicated he would settle at “remote acreage in the care of” a half-brother in Spaulding, a tiny rural community approximately five miles south of Holdenville in Hughes County.
“This location, which includes a travel trailer and fishing shack, is on private property which can/will be deeded to Mr. McGirt,” the memo stated. “It is also adjacent to a community of sexual offenders.”
McGirt maintained that his BOP evaluation after his first conviction placed him “at a low risk of recidivism…” Once destined to die in prison His release from custody was a remarkable turnaround for a man initially destined to die in prison.
In 1997 a Wagoner County jury convicted McGirt of first-degree rape by instrumentation, lewd molestation and forcible sodomy of a 4-year-old girl at a residence in Broken Arrow. The victim testified in court that Mc-Girt sexually molested her three times in 1996 while she was staying with her grandmother and McGirt, who was then married to the grandmother.
McGirt was sentenced in 1997 to 500 years’ imprisonment on the first two charges and life without parole on the third, at least in part because he previously was convicted in 1989 on two counts of forcible oral sodomy of two children in Oklahoma County.
In his appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, McGirt’s attorney pointed out that his client and the victim both are citizens of the Seminole Nation and the crimes in Wagoner County occurred at a residence within the boundaries of the Muscogee (Creek) tribal reservation.
McGirt’s appeal led to a 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court ruling July 9, 2020, that reshaped the criminal justice system in Oklahoma. The Court decreed that the Creek Nation reservation in eastern Oklahoma was never disestablished by Congress.
State courts subsequently affirmed that eight other reservations in eastern Oklahoma – including the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaws, Ottawa, Peoria, Quapaw, Wyandotte, and Seminole tribes – were never dissolved, either. As a direct result, Native Americans accused of committing serious crimes anywhere in “Indian Country” must be prosecuted in federal or tribal courts.
McGirt was retried in federal court in November 2020 and convicted again. And again on appeal his conviction was overturned, this time by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
On Dec. 5, 2023, he pleaded guilty in Muskogee’s Eastern District federal court to one count of aggravated sexual abuse in Indian Country. He confessed to sexually abusing a child.
Despite the Supreme Court’s ruling in McGirt v. Oklahoma, it did not affect all of Oklahoma – a Choctaw term for “red people.”
State district courts and the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals have determined that the Kickapoo, the Cheyenne- Arapaho, and the Kiowa Comanche and Apache reservations are “no longer Indian Country within the meaning of federal law.” The Kickapoo and the Cheyenne- Arapaho reservations were disestablished in 1891, and the Kiowa Comanche and Apache reservation was disestablished in 1900.