California v. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians
Indian tribes have been generally mired in poverty for a very long time, since being herded on reservations in the early days of the coming of the white man, and the Cabazon and Morongo Indians of Southern California had it worse than most.
All they had back in the 1980’s were a few HUD buildings and a few trailers and lived in abject poverty, with even their meager treaties being to a large degree neglected by the State. Around this time, a few Indian tribes across the country were opening up bingo halls, and these tribes decided that they would try to help themselves by opening up their own gambling operations, which included offering bingo and stud poker.
The laws of California do permit card rooms, but only if the house does not take a percentage of the action, and does allow bingo, if the games are small and the proceeds are being donated to charity. In both cases though one must first receive a license from the State to be allowed to operate.
The Indian tribes had no such license, nor was the state prepared to grant one. They just went ahead with the bingo and poker halls anyway, and soon started doing a good business, attracting many people from off the reservation who would visit it to gamble.
This did not sit well with local law enforcement or the state though, and soon the police arrived, and shut down their gambling operations and seized their funds as well. It seems that this experiment ended up as a failure, but these Indians were not prepared to give up quite so easily.
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The Landmark Case From A Decade Earlier
The background story shows they build a pretty good legal argument against local and state officials having the authority to shut them down like this, and a lot of the basis stems from a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States a decade earlier, in Bryan v. Itasca County.
A couple named Russell and Helen Bryan, Native Americans residing on a reservation in northern Minnesota, received an unwanted property tax bill from Itasca County. They had never received such a tax notice before and struggled to pay it, so they chose to contest it instead. They pondered their next steps carefully.
To address this issue, they sued the county in the state courts, and lost, and appealed it to the Minnesota Supreme Court, and faced defeat again. However, they managed to have the Supreme Court of the United States hear the case, in 1976, who not only ruled in their favor, they went further and opened the possibility for Indian gaming by concluding that provided states did not have the legal power to regulate Indians on reservations at all.
The details of this case were interesting issues from a legal perspective because it brought to light the application of an obscure law called Public Law 280 which assigned certain privileges to states in dealing with Indians on federal reservations, and certain parts of this were murky and had not been challenged in court, until now that is. This was a significant development.
Federal government handles Indian reservations, who grant the Indians living on them a certain degree of independence, but the state does not have any inherent authority to them and the rights they do have are afforded by the federal government.
Therefore there are some scenarios where the states need the ability to intercede on reservation lands, such as to enforce criminal matters, and since it is the states that create and enforce much of the criminal law, if they could not go on reservations and detain individuals, then the law may not be effective there, and criminals could perpetrate crimes in the state and then seek refuge on reservations, which was viewed as unacceptable.
Hence Public Law 280, enacted in 1953, attempted to clarify when states had jurisdiction on Indian lands, and authorized the right to do so in criminal affairs, but generally did not in regulatory matters. So essentially they really didn’t have the power to regulate the reservations like they did within the state boundaries.
In this specific instance, the Supreme Court concluded that this law did not authorize the county to tax the Indians, nor did they have the right to regulate them at all. So not only did the Bryans win, subsequently if a state sought to regulate Indians on reservations, this set a legal precedent which courts would now have to honor.
The Cabazon and Moranga Tribes Fight Back
So the case of California v. Cabazon Indians took a different turn, as the Indians took the matter to federal court and this time the Indians won, and this time it was the State that appealed the matter all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, but the result was the same, the Indians won.
While it was accepted that the State could not regulate the Indians, from the previous precedent, the State argued that this was a criminal matter, and they were enforcing their criminal code and were entitled to do that under Public Law 280.
The Indians argued that this wasn’t a criminal matter at all, but instead a regulatory one, as gambling is permitted in California under certain circumstances, and therefore the act of offering it is a matter of regulation, of receiving a license from the state to be allowed to do so, and the state is not entitled to regulate them in such a fashion.
Like a lot of cases, this one could have really gone either way, and often times the court will lean one way or another and there is often a fair bit of latitude in applying the law more widely or narrowly.
It could have been decided that since the particular gambling that was being offered by the tribes are in fact against the criminal code, the court sought to look at gambling in general as being permitted and use that as a basis for deciding that this was a matter of regulation primarily and therefore the state did not have the legal right to shut down these games.
Often times a state will make gambling illegal generally and then issue licenses and the licenses supersede the law, so the mere fact that the gambling in question was contrary to the criminal code wasn’t enough, and the court did decide the matter correctly in seeing this as primarily a regulatory issue.
This ended up blowing the doors right off the regulation of gambling on Indian reservations, and the federal government moved quickly to pass a new law to impose regulations of their own, and the next year, the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act was passed by Congress, which at least set some limits and a framework whereby Indian gaming would be permitted.