The U.S. Supreme Court case Emery L. Negonsott v. Harold Samuels, Warden, et al., 1992 involved a dispute over jurisdiction in criminal cases involving Native Americans on tribal land. The petitioner, Emery L. Negonsott, was convicted of murder by the Kickapoo Tribe in Kansas and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole under the Indian Civil Rights Act (ICRA). He filed a habeas corpus petition arguing that his conviction violated his Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury trial because he was tried by members of his own tribe rather than a cross-section of the community at large. The central issue before the court was whether ICRA's guarantee for "the full protection" of constitutional rights included those not explicitly mentioned within its text such as Sixth Amendment’s jury-trial guarantee which is absent from ICRA's text but implicit in its purpose. In a unanimous decision authored by Justice Byron White, it held that ICRA did not incorporate all protections provided under Bill Of Rights including those related to federal or state prosecutions thus rejecting Negonsott’s argument and affirming lower courts' decisions denying him relief.

In the dissenting opinion for Negonsott v. Samuels, Justice Thomas argued that the majority misinterpreted the Kansas Act of 1940 and its impact on tribal sovereignty. He contended that this act did not grant jurisdiction to federal courts over crimes committed by or against Native Americans on their reservations in Kansas. Instead, he believed it merely extended state criminal law onto these lands without altering who had authority to prosecute such offenses. Therefore, according to him, only tribal or state courts could hear these cases unless Congress explicitly stated otherwise - which it hadn't done so here. This interpretation would respect both tribes' inherent sovereignty and states' traditional police powers while also adhering more closely to statutory text and historical context.