The Supreme Court turned its attention to the relationship between the federal government and American Indian tribes, in considering whether an Indian in North Dakota who punched a police officer can be charged twice for the same swing.

The justices heard arguments Wednesday over the right of a tribe to prosecute members of other tribes, in a case stemming from a 2001 fight on the Spirit Lake Indian Reservation in North Dakota.

The ruling is expected to determine the fate of a law Congress passed in answer to a 1990 Supreme Court decision that held tribes could not prosecute nonmembers. The law restored that power to tribes.

Federal prosecutors could bring charges against nonmembers without the law, but they generally focus their attention on high-profile and serious offenses and leave misdemeanor charges to tribal courts. A decision striking down the law could leave those lesser crimes unpunished, lawyers for 18 tribes have argued in briefs filed with the court.

The law restoring the power of tribes to prosecute nonmembers was passed "immediately" after the 1990 ruling, which itself said "the proper body to address that concern is Congress," Deputy Solicitor General Edwin Kneedler told justices during arguments Wednesday.

Without it, there would be a "law enforcement vacuum" on reservations, Kneedler said.

Billy Jo Lara pleaded guilty in a Spirit Lake tribal court to punching a Bureau of Indian Affairs officer. Lara was sentenced to a total of 155 days for that and two other charges.

Lara is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, which governs a reservation about 65 miles from Spirit Lake.

Federal prosecutors later charged him in U.S. District Court with assaulting a federal officer, but the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the lower court to dismiss the charge.

Lara's lawyer drew a line Wednesday between Lara's case and those in which tribes prosecute their own members using their power as sovereign governments within the United States.

Alexander Reichert of Grand Forks, N.D., argued that in cases such as Lara's, tribal prosecutors are carrying out powers given them by the United States, making a second prosecution in U.S. District Court a violation of the Constitution's double jeopardy clause.

Reichert said Congress can take away sovereign powers from tribes but not give them back.

"Where do you get the authority for that one-way ratcheting?" Justice Sandra Day O'Connor asked Reichert, who cited a number of earlier cases.

"Whatever power they exercise, they exercise because we let them, isn't that right?" Justice Antonin Scalia asked.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg challenged Reichert to explain why, if the tribal prosecution was improper, the second prosecution would not then be allowed, since it would become the first valid attempt to put Lara in jail.

Reichert said the difference rests on the fact Lara served his punishment for the first conviction. The double jeopardy clause of the Constitution, he said, prohibits two separate punishments for the same crime, not separate court cases.

"The government can't rewrite the log of the jail," he said. "(Lara) was there."

The court's decision is expected by July. The case is United States v. Lara, 03-107.

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