There's a Zone in America Where You Can Legally Get Away With Murder

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]There is a 50 square mile patch of Yellowstone National Park where you can commit any crime and it is constitutionally impossible to prosecute you.

[00:00:07]In 2005, law professor Brian Kalt was researching federal jurisdiction when he found something that should not exist.

[00:00:14]A slice of Yellowstone sits geographically inside Idaho, but falls under the jurisdiction of Wyoming's federal district court.

[00:00:22]That combination is perfectly legal.

[00:00:25]The problem is the Sixth Amendment.

[00:00:27]It guarantees every defendant a jury drawn from both the state and the district where the crime occurred.

[00:00:33]That means Idaho.

[00:00:35]That specific zone of Idaho, inside Wyoming's federal court district, has a permanent population of exactly zero.

[00:00:42]No residents.

[00:00:43]No jury pool.

[00:00:45]No trial.

[00:00:47]Kalt published his findings, alerting Congress to the loophole.

[00:00:51]He even named it himself, the Zone of Death.

[00:00:54]Congress reviewed it, acknowledged it, and then did nothing.

[00:01:00]No legislation.

[00:01:02]No fix.

[00:01:03]The zone remains open to this day.

[00:01:06]No one has yet tested it in a criminal case, but legal scholars agree the constitutional argument is sound.

[00:01:12]Kalt wasn't speculating.

[00:01:15]He was warning.

[00:01:16]The framers wrote the Sixth Amendment to protect defendants from government overreach.

[00:01:21]Nobody considered what happens when that protection makes prosecution mathematically impossible.

[00:01:27]Some loopholes are oversights.

[00:01:29]This one is a structural flaw in the Constitution itself, and Congress chose to leave it there.

[00:01:35]Follow for cases they never taught you.