Consult a Criminal Defense Attorney When Assistance Needed
Video Transcribed:
Where do you find the Muscogee (Creek) Nation Tribal Code? I’m Tulsa attorney James Wirth, and I’m about to tell you how to find that Code. All right, so first off, in dealing with state law, which we deal with historically a lot more, it’s found online at oscn.net.
They’ve got it all on there, you can click through to the titles and into the sections. They keep it up to date. They’ve got links to the prior versions. It’s pretty well done online, and it’s been that way for a long time.
But now we’ve got the McGirt from the United States Supreme Court, which says that the Muscogee (Creek) Nation Reservation was never disestablished through statehood, which means that way more land than we thought now is actually on the reservation and subject to the jurisdiction of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, and that includes most of Tulsa County and many of the surrounding counties.
So, that means a lot more cases are going to be going on in Muscogee (Creek) Tribal Court, particularly we’re talking about criminal cases.
So, the question becomes where do you find those codes? Where do you find the applicable information? And that’s what I’m about to tell you. So, they do have it available on their website, but it’s a little bit different than OSCN.
What they’ve got is a link to the different titles, and then they’ve got a PDF for each of those titles that has all of it together at once, so all of the statutes, all of the crimes, altogether in one PDF. So you can’t get it in text, you can’t do…
Well, I think you can do actually a CTRL+F to find it in the PDF version, but it’s not quite as easy to go through. And then as far as the amendments, because it’s a PDF, they’re not updated that way.
So for example, if you just pull the main Title 14, which is the criminal code, and look at the punishment, it says the general punishment for felonies is 30 days to one year in jail.
However, that has been amended. In December of 2010, that was amended to be up to three years in jail for felonies, but you actually have to find the supplemental packet and download that to see that.
So, you’ve got the main Title 14, which has most things, and then you’ve got I believe five or six amendment packages you have to review to check to make sure that statute is up to date. So, you want to check both of those to be careful, but where do you find that?
I’m going to give you that URL. You go to www.creeksupremecourt.com/mcn-code. So you can go on there to do it, otherwise, I think I’m going to put some links down below if you want to look for that, to have a link to where you can find at least the criminal code.
But if you’re looking for that and you’ve got oklahoma legal questions, you’re probably going to want to talk to an attorney anyway about your circumstances. So if that’s the case, you can contact somebody at my office by going to makelaweasy.com.
