Venue, Jurisdiction, and Vicinage

Venue, Jurisdiction, and Vicinage

Venue is the physical location or judicial district in which a prosecution will take place.¹ Its rules are spread across statutes, court rules, and the constitutions of the United States and many states, so a venue problem can draw on several sources of law at once.² The rules serve two purposes: fairness to the accused, who should not have to submit to trial in a remote location, and accurate fact-finding at a place where the witnesses and circumstances relevant to the issues are available.³ Each purpose has its own logic. The government chooses the forum, and a prosecutor free to pick any courthouse could select one so far from the defendant's home, lawyers, and sources of proof that the burden of simply being there would shade the outcome. Accurate fact-finding concerns the evidence. The people who saw the events and the physical surroundings that matter to the issues are usually found where the events happened, and a trial held there puts the factfinder closest to the proof.

Two neighboring ideas also involve geography, and a reader who treats either as venue will misread Rule 18. Jurisdiction is the power of a court to decide the case at all, and vicinage is the geographic area from which the jurors are drawn.⁴ Venue differs from both because it takes the court's power as given and asks where, among the places that power reaches, the trial should be held. That is the question Rule 18 addresses when it directs the government to prosecute in a district where the offense was committed and leaves the court to fix the place of trial within the district.⁵ Because geography appears in all three ideas, the right label depends on what is being asked: whether the court has power, where the trial will be held, or where the jurors come from. The next subsection takes up jurisdiction, the idea most often confused with venue, and the one after it turns to vicinage.

Venue Versus Jurisdiction

Jurisdiction is the power or authority of a court to decide a case, and it comes first in logical order because venue presupposes it.⁷ Venue assumes the court already has power over the offense and asks a narrower question: among the places that power reaches, where should this trial be held?⁸ A court that lacks jurisdiction cannot try the case anywhere. A court that has jurisdiction may still be sitting in the wrong place for a particular prosecution. The two questions can therefore receive different answers in the same case, which is why the labels have to be kept apart.

The most important way jurisdiction touches location is geographic, and the reason follows from a short chain of steps.⁹ A court enforces only the enactments of the legislature that stands behind it. As a general rule, a legislature may not criminalize conduct that occurs outside the boundaries of the political entity it governs. A prosecution for conduct wholly outside those boundaries therefore asks the court to enforce a law that never reached the conduct, so courts generally lack jurisdiction to try cases occurring outside the region in which they are located.¹⁰ Congress has a limited extraterritorial jurisdiction to protect and punish United States citizens, which marks the one recognized qualification to the geographic limit.¹¹

On the federal side, the question about a particular court is almost always venue, because Congress has given the district courts original jurisdiction over all offenses against the laws of the United States.¹² Every district court therefore has the power that matters over a federal offense, and an objection that one district rather than another was chosen goes to place. The trap on an exam is calling a wrong-district objection a lack of jurisdiction. In United States v. Cabrales the indictment was returned in the Western District of Missouri and charged money laundering that took place entirely in Florida, with the funds traceable to cocaine sales in Missouri.¹³ Nobody questioned that federal courts may try federal money-laundering offenses. The Court held only that Missouri was not a proper place for trial of those counts, applying the command that prosecution be had in a district where the offense was committed.¹⁴

Civil litigation draws the same line, and a civil illustration shows how separate the two questions are, though it is not criminal authority. In Goldlawr, Inc. v. Heiman a federal court in Pennsylvania found that venue was improper as to two corporate defendants and transferred the case to New York under 28 U.S.C. § 1406(a), rather than dismissing it.¹⁵ The defendants argued that the Pennsylvania court lacked personal jurisdiction over them and so had no power to transfer. The Supreme Court rejected that argument and read the statute as authorizing transfer of a wrongly venued case whether or not the transferring court had personal jurisdiction over the defendants.¹⁶ A dissent in Hoffman v. Blaski described venue in related terms, as the locality where a federal court exercises power it already has.¹⁷

The cases in this chapter all share one assumption: the court has power to try the offense, and the only dispute is where the trial belongs. The same distinction keeps venue separate from a third geographic idea, vicinage, which concerns where the jurors come from and is the subject of the next subsection.

Venue Versus Vicinage

Vicinage is the geographic area from which the jurors for a particular trial are drawn.¹⁹ Historically the concept required that jurors come from the vicinity where the crime was committed. The reason is practical: people who live in that place are familiar with its local values and circumstances, so they are better placed to judge conduct against the setting in which it happened.²⁰ Vicinage therefore answers a question about who sits in the jury box, while venue answers a question about where the trial is held. The two are easy to merge because both point toward the locale of the offense, yet either can be asked about a case without settling the other.

In practice the answers usually match, because trial is conventionally held in the same place the jury is selected.²¹ That convention explains why the Sixth Amendment, which was written as a jury-selection provision and not as a rule fixing the place of trial, also works as a venue provision.²² The amendment does not literally provide for venue, but it defines the vicinage from which jurors can be drawn, and it has consistently been read to guarantee trial in the district where the crime was committed.²³ The amendment also left it to Congress to delineate the judicial districts, so how closely a jury must track the scene of the crime has depended partly on legislative choice. Congress insisted on a jury of the vicinage for capital offenses and did otherwise for non-capital ones.²⁴

The reach of the constitutional guarantee appears in Franklin v. United States. There a defendant convicted of perjury in the Macon Division of the Middle District of Georgia argued that the trial belonged in the Albany Division, and that the 1966 amendment to Rule 18, which required only that the prosecution be had in a district where the offense was committed, was unconstitutional.²⁵ The court rejected the argument, reasoning that an accused has a constitutional right to a jury trial in the district where the crime was committed but no constitutional guaranty of trial in the division of the district where the offense occurred.²⁶ The constitutional text names the district, so anything smaller is left to rules and statutes. That is why the choice of courthouse inside a district falls to the second sentence of Rule 18 and not to the Constitution.²⁷

On an exam stem, the question being asked separates the labels. A fact about the courthouse where the trial sits raises venue, while a fact about the area the jury pool was summoned from raises vicinage. The trap is to treat where the jurors come from as if it answered where the trial is held. Because the two normally coincide, a stem that pulls them apart is drawing the distinction on purpose, and the answer depends on identifying which of the two the facts actually disturb. The next section turns to the constitutional text that joins them, beginning with the founders' complaint that produced the command to try a case where the offense was committed.