County Appoints Special Prosecutor in Herrera Case

The Sheridan County Commission has voted to allow the appointment of a special prosecutor in the State of Wyoming vs. Clayvin Herrera case.

County Prosecuting Attorney Dianna Bennett made the request of the commission at this week’s meeting, saying she was seeking the appointment of Deputy Attorney General James Kaste of the Water and Natural Resources Division of the Wyoming Attorney General’s Office to help Sheridan County as a special prosecutor in the case.

Bennett explained that the case, which began in 2014 as a poaching case and has moved from local courts to the US Supreme Court and back to the local courts again.

She is seeking the expertise of the attorney general’s office in the matters involving the case.

Bennett said the case is an important one for the state moving forward.

From an earlier Sheridan Media story: In 2014, Herrera and two other tribal members embarked on an elk hunt that began on the Crow tribe’s reservation in southern Montana and ultimately crossed into the neighboring Bighorn National Forest in Wyoming, where three elk were shot and killed illegally. In April of 2016, a six-person jury in Sheridan County Circuit Court found Clayvin Herrera guilty on charges of knowingly taking an antlered animal out of season in Wyoming and being an accessory after the fact. The Crow tribal member received a suspended jail sentence and was ordered to pay fines in the amount of $8,080. Herrera also lost his hunting privileges for three years.

Herrera appealed the sentence, arguing that when his tribe gave up land in present-day Montana and Wyoming under an 1868 treaty, the tribe retained the right to hunt on the land, including land that became Wyoming’s Bighorn National Forest. The Treaty of Fort Laramie grants hunting rights to Crow tribal members, who “shall have the right to hunt on the unoccupied lands of the United States so long as game may be found thereon, and as long as peace subsists among the whites and Indians on the borders of the hunting districts.”

The State of Wyoming argued that the Bighorn National Forest is not “unoccupied” and the Crow tribe’s hunting rights ceased to exist as the treaty would have been considered void after Wyoming became a state in 1890 or after establishment of the Bighorn National Forest in 1897.

On a side note, Herrera, according to Bennett, has been incarcerated in the State of Montana for over a year facing strangulation, drug, and child pornography charges.