Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on The Inertia. It was updated with new information on January 26, 2026.
According to a Georgetown Law Journal article, “The Perfect Crime,” one can commit felonies “with impunity” in one small area of Yellowstone. That’s because a poorly written law and a clear, but overlooked, Constitutional provision created a singular situation there that some lawmakers have called a loophole.
The area’s nickname: the “Yellowstone Zone of Death.”
Representative Colin Nash, D-Boise, brought the “lawless” issue before the Idaho state legislature in February 2022. The measure then cleared both chambers and became state policy. After that, the petition, known as Joint Memorial 3 (HJM3), moved on to Idaho’s U.S. Congressional delegation with a “do pass” recommendation.
According to reporting from jurist.org, “the Chief Clerk of the Idaho Representatives [was] ‘authorized and directed’ to forward a copy of the bill to the senate president and the speaker of the house at the federal level as well as to the congressional delegation representing the state of Idaho.”
However, there has been no progress on HJM3 since then, and Nash retired from the House in 2024. Today, the loophole remains open at the federal level. So, if you wanted to engage in felonious behavior (which, of course, you most definitely should not), you could still benefit from buying a plane ticket to eastern Idaho and visiting this remote part of Yellowstone.
Yellowstone Death Zone: Jurisdictional Anomaly Creates Gray Area
The legal technicality behind this loophole is that not a single person lives in this 50-square-mile area of Idaho. That was true as of the 2020 census, according to the Idaho Capital Sun.
The total lack of a federally recognized population in the Death Zone becomes a problem if a criminal defendant invokes their Sixth Amendment rights regarding a federal crime in that zone. The Sixth Amendment’s Vicinage Clause states, roughly, that a jury must try a defendant in a federal crime inside the jurisdiction where the crime took place. But if you don’t have a population, you can’t appoint a jury.
“So under the legal theory, if there is no one that lives in that state and district in this 50-square-mile swath of Yellowstone Park, there would be no constitutionally legitimate jury to be seated so that person could be tried,” Nash told members of the Idaho House Judiciary, Rules, and Administration Committee on Feb. 3, 2022.
He added that the purpose of HJM3 was to fix this legal loophole. He wanted to “put this 50-square-mile section of Yellowstone National Park into the federal judicial district of the state of Idaho.” Why? So that their local courts can “maintain jurisdiction and can seat a constitutionally legitimate jury to try people who may commit crimes in that swath of Yellowstone Park.”
Nash said that to his knowledge, no crimes had occurred in the Yellowstone Zone of Death and gone unprosecuted. However, that doesn’t mean it’s never happened. After all, the original article, “The Perfect Crime,” was first published in the Georgetown Law Journal in 2005.
It should be noted that Idaho’s state jurisdiction has always applied in this region (so it is not completely lawless).
Despite the traction Nash’s HJM3 generated in the media, the petition stalled after passing the House. Congress did not take federal action on it. While Nash retired in 2024, the Joint Memorial could still be acted on by Congress. However, at this point, that seems unlikely to happen.
So, at least for now, the Yellowstone “Zone of Death” remains exactly that.
