From the Sentencing Project (http://www.sentencingproject.org):
Nearly all American Indian tribes have rejected the option of pursuing the death penalty against their citizens for federal crimes committed on their land, reports the Associated Press. “Congress expanded the list of death-penalty eligible crimes in the mid-1990s, allowing tribes to decide if they wanted their citizens subject to the death penalty,” explain reporters Felicia Fonseca and Russell Contreras. But since 1994 only one tribe, the Sac and Fox Nation of Oklahoma, has opted in for the death penalty. A tribe’s decision to opt out of the federal death penalty is not made on a case-by-case basis but rather is an overarching policy. Tribes have opted out for reasons including cultural and religious views, past treatment of American Indians, and lack of fairness in the justice system. For example, as Tribal Council Speaker LoRenzo Bates explains: “Navajos see life as precious, good or bad, and so we don’t pick and choose.… All life is precious.”
Still, American Indians are not fully exempt from executions. Since 1976, 16 Native Americans have been executed for crimes committed off tribal land or in states where the federal government does not have jurisdiction over major crimes committed on reservations. In addition, tribes cannot opt out of the death penalty for certain federal crimes including carjacking or kidnapping resulting in death, or killing a federal officer on reservation land.
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