Zone of Death (Yellowstone) | Hacker News Reader

Zone of Death (Yellowstone)

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35 pointsmikpanko11 comments

> Belderrain cited Kalt's paper "The Perfect Crime" to explain why he believed it was illegal to have his trial with a jury from a state other than where the crime was committed. The court dismissed this argument.

Realistically, this is all that's going to happen if/when anyone commits a serious crime in one of these loophole zones. The court isn't just going to throw up its hands and say "you got us" to a murderer.

'law is not code' is a simple phrase that consistently seems to escape most HN users.

It surely escapes me. What does it mean?

That you cannot hack law as you would with smart contracts, because law is enforced by humans, not computers.

The law is interpreted, not executed. It has intention that will be applied by judges and juries. Sometimes you can find loopholes in a law if a judge/jury is willing to follow a specific, often narrow interpretation of the law, but that's harder than it seems at first glance.

I haven't heard this phrase (rather, I've heard "code is law" in reference to a subset of smart contract exploits that could also be considered "creative arbitrage opportunities" if you squint enough)

But in this case, the person you're responding to is pointing out that law has the ability to be interpreted and even "created" ad-hoc through that interpretation, unlike code which needs to be updated to be changed.

It means that "the law" isn't rigorously defined enough to execute on a computer. There's a reason we have judges, juries, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and all the other accoutrements of the judicial system. And that reason is that there is a need for human judgment and discretion when it comes to interpreting and executing the law.

So no, you're probably not going to "get away with murder" due to an obscure and questionable loophole like the so-called "zone of death". Judges are going to apply their judgment, decide that no one involved in crafting the law intended such an outcome, and that the equitable thing to do is "some compromise that fit the situation as best as possible".

Traditional way of expressing it is "following the spirit of the law vs the letter of the law". But in case of U.S. Constitution opinions are always divided, which of these interpretation is the right one.

well he did cut a deal for himself. I wonder if it was serious enough he could have pressed it further.

You're wrong. IANAL, but I've spent thousands of hours in criminal court. The courts regularly dismiss murder cases on constitutional grounds, despite the murderer having clearly committed the murder.

I would say murders are the most dismissed cases, simply because most other crimes end in plea deals, whereas a lot of murders are taken to trial because the sentence differential between the plea deal (which might be say, 20 years on a murder) vs. the likely sentence following a jury trial (which might be say, 30 years) is irrelevant because both are pretty much life sentences and defendants would rather try their luck at spending 10 years in a pretrial detention facility to fight the case and win on say a constitutional violation.

I think the next sentence is what really had impact:

> Belderrain took a plea deal conditioned such that he would not appeal the Zone of Death issue to the 10th Circuit, rendering the issue moot, at least for the time being.

The whole story is a little hard to track. As far as I can tell he killed multiple elk in 2005 and left at least one of them headless in Yellowstone which was quickly discovered. A month later the Government found it's head in a taxidermy shop. He then signed the plea deal for poaching the elk waiving his right to claim the Zone of Death issue, but critically didn't mention his connection to the head. After the plea deal was signed, the Government linked the head to the body via DNA testing. Since this was "new information" it wasn't covered by the plea deal and he was convicted based on this evidence. He appealed to the 10th Circuit, claiming that the Government breached the plea deal by charging him for the elk, but the Government claimed the head was a separate crime and that his previous lies caused the Government to not suspect that link. The court sided with the Government. He got at least four years of jail, three years of probation, and some fines.

This is a good reminder to always describe the fullest extent of your crimes in a plea deal. Any omission, even accidental, can be spun into a new charge if new information surfaces.

[1] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca10/0...

[2] https://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/news/yellowstone-elk-p...

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