The United States District Court for the District of Wyoming serves the least populous state in the country — and, uniquely among the 94 federal districts, its territory reaches into three states, because Congress assigned it the slices of Yellowstone National Park that lie in Montana and Idaho. A federal case here is heard in Cheyenne or Casper by a small, long-tenured bench, under federal rules and sentencing law that bear no resemblance to Wyoming state practice.
Here we cover the District of Wyoming in working detail: its three-judgeship bench and the courthouse inside Yellowstone, the famous venue question scholars call the “Zone of Death,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office under its newly confirmed leadership, what the district’s sentencing data reveals, and how our firm appears in this court. Elizabeth Franklin-Best, P.C. practices federal criminal defense, appeals, and post-conviction litigation nationwide. Our principal attorney, Elizabeth Franklin-Best, maintains a nationwide federal post-conviction and appellate practice — appearing pro hac vice from Montana to Florida across more than 330 federal proceedings, including over 100 appeals in all twelve federal circuits and cert-stage matters at the U.S. Supreme Court, with particular depth in Section 2255 litigation, capital habeas, First Step Act Section 404 resentencings, and compassionate release. She carries a 2026 “Best Lawyer” selection in Appellate Practice from Best Lawyers in America together with a Chambers USA 2026 ranking for Litigation: White-Collar Crime & Government Investigations. This page is part of our federal courts directory.
If a federal agency is investigating you in Wyoming, or an indictment has already been returned in this district, our paid, one-hour initial consultation puts experienced federal eyes on the problem before the next decision gets made.
Table of Contents
Quick Answer: District of Wyoming
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| What court handles federal cases in Wyoming? | The U.S. District Court for the District of Wyoming — the whole state plus, by statute, the Montana and Idaho portions of Yellowstone National Park — with courthouses in Cheyenne and Casper and a court location at Mammoth inside the park. |
| Who sits on the bench? | Three district judgeships are authorized by 28 U.S.C. § 133. As of mid-2026 the court is led by Chief Judge Kelly H. Rankin, with Judge Scott W. Skavdahl and Judges Alan B. Johnson and Nancy D. Freudenthal continuing to hear cases. |
| Who prosecutes federal cases there? | The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Wyoming under Darin D. Smith, Senate-confirmed on May 18, 2026, and sworn in on May 28, 2026. |
| What does the docket look like? | Small and distinctive: 179 people sentenced in FY2024, with drug trafficking at 35.2%, firearms at 19.0%, and an assault share five times the national figure — a product of federal jurisdiction over major crimes in Indian country, including the Wind River Reservation. |
| What is the “Zone of Death”? | A law-review puzzle about the uninhabited Idaho strip of Yellowstone, which sits in this district: scholars have questioned how a jury could be drawn there consistent with the Sixth Amendment. No court has ever dismissed a prosecution over it — park crimes are tried in this district. |
| Which circuit hears appeals? | The Tenth Circuit in Denver, which also covers Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Utah. |
| Can our firm appear in the District of Wyoming? | Yes. Local Rule 84.2(b) admits out-of-state counsel pro hac vice on a motion filed by a member of the Wyoming and court bars — a per-case admission we arrange with local counsel. |
| Where does the engagement start? | With a paid, one-hour initial consultation built around your specific exposure in this district — investigation, indictment, appeal, or post-conviction. |
Key Takeaways
- Under 28 U.S.C. § 131, the District of Wyoming is the only federal district whose territory lies in three states — Wyoming plus the Montana and Idaho portions of Yellowstone National Park.
- The court has existed since statehood in 1890, and its current four Article III judges are only the fifth through eighth in the district’s entire history, by the court’s own account.
- Chief Judge Kelly H. Rankin leads the bench as of mid-2026; three judgeships are authorized by 28 U.S.C. § 133.
- Clerk’s offices operate in Cheyenne (main), Casper, and Mammoth Hot Springs inside Yellowstone, where a magistrate judge is stationed; the statute also names Evanston, Lander, Jackson, and Sheridan as seats.
- FY2024 saw 179 people sentenced — a docket measured in the hundreds, where drug trafficking (35.2%) and firearms (19.0%) lead and assault runs five times the national share because of Indian-country jurisdiction, including the Wind River Reservation.
- Wyoming’s white-collar cases skew toward energy and investment fraud — a federal jury here convicted the NuTech Energy Resources defendants of securities fraud, and a Lander man drew 63 months for CARES Act wire fraud.
- Darin D. Smith became the district’s Senate-confirmed U.S. Attorney on May 18, 2026, and was sworn in ten days later.
- The 14-day notice-of-appeal window under Rule 4(b) is the tightest deadline in any federal criminal case — in a small district, there is no crowd to hide a missed date.
- Section 2255 motions attacking District of Wyoming judgments are filed in this court; appellate and post-conviction litigation is our firm’s deepest bench.
The District of Wyoming at a Glance
The District of Wyoming is the federal trial court for all of Wyoming and — under 28 U.S.C. § 131 — for “those portions of Yellowstone National Park situated in Montana and Idaho,” making it the only federal judicial district that crosses state lines. The statute directs that court be held at Casper, Cheyenne, Evanston, Lander, Jackson, and Sheridan; in staffed reality, the court’s main office sits in Cheyenne at 2120 Capitol Avenue, with offices in Casper and at Mammoth, the historic park headquarters inside Yellowstone, and court presence in Lander.
The government’s side of every case belongs to the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Wyoming, prosecuting from Cheyenne for a state of well under 600,000 people. Appellate review belongs to the Tenth Circuit in Denver — and because a small district generates a thin body of local precedent, Wyoming federal cases are argued largely on circuit-wide and Supreme Court authority, which favors counsel who litigates that law everywhere.
Cases proceed under the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure and the district’s local rules and general orders — a compact rulebook for a compact court. The practical texture is different from a big-city district: fewer judges means faster pattern recognition on both sides of the aisle, calendars move, and reputations — for preparation or the lack of it — form quickly and travel the whole district.
A Three-Judgeship Bench With 130 Years of History
Congress gives Wyoming three district judgeships under 28 U.S.C. § 133, and the court wears its continuity proudly: it has existed since Wyoming statehood in July 1890, and the four Article III judges serving today are, by the court’s own account, only the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth in the district’s entire history. As of mid-2026 the roster is Chief Judge Kelly H. Rankin — appointed to the bench in 2024 and now leading the court — alongside Judge Scott W. Skavdahl and Judges Alan B. Johnson and Nancy D. Freudenthal. Judge Johnson has served since 1985; Judge Freudenthal, the district’s chief judge from 2011 to 2018, took senior status in June 2022 per the Federal Judicial Center and continues to hear cases.
The magistrate bench mirrors the geography: Chief Magistrate Judge Scott P. Klosterman sits in Cheyenne, Magistrate Judge Stephanie A. Hambrick sits at Mammoth Hot Springs inside Yellowstone National Park, and part-time magistrate judges serve Casper and Lander. Initial appearances, detention hearings, and petty-offense dockets — including the steady stream of park violations — run through these chambers.
For the defense, a bench this small is double-edged. Every judge’s sentencing history is knowable in detail, and we study it before the first filing; but there is no judge-shopping and nowhere to be anonymous, so credibility with the court is an asset to be built from the first appearance — and never spent cheaply.
Yellowstone, Venue, and the “Zone of Death” Question
Yellowstone National Park is federal land under exclusive federal jurisdiction, and § 131 places all of it — including the strips lying in Montana and Idaho — in the District of Wyoming. Crimes committed in the park are therefore federal cases tried in this district, and the court does not treat the park as an afterthought: it stations a magistrate judge at Mammoth and maintains a clerk’s office there.
The arrangement produced one of the best-known puzzles in legal scholarship, popularly called the “Zone of Death.” The Sixth Amendment entitles a defendant to a jury drawn from the state and district where the crime occurred. For the roughly fifty-square-mile Idaho portion of the park — which has essentially no resident population — law-review commentary has long asked how such a jury could ever be assembled, and whether a serious crime committed there could be tried at all. It is a genuine drafting oddity that Congress could fix by redrawing the district line. But it is academic, not practical: no court has ever dismissed a prosecution on this theory, park offenses are charged and resolved in this district as a matter of routine, and venue and vicinage objections are case-specific arguments that courts have multiple tools to resolve. We mention it because clients ask — not because anyone should mistake a thought experiment for a defense.
Federal Criminal Cases in the District
The District of Wyoming handles the full range of federal criminal matters — white-collar offenses and fraud, drug and firearms cases, and other federal prosecutions. A federal case in the district generally moves through a recognizable sequence.
Most cases begin with an investigation by a federal agency, sometimes signaled by a target letter or a grand jury subpoena. Formal charges follow, typically by indictment. After an initial appearance and arraignment, the case proceeds through pretrial litigation and discovery, and is then resolved either by a negotiated plea agreement or by trial. A conviction is followed by sentencing under the federal framework. The firm’s federal criminal process hub walks through each stage in detail.
In a district this size, the same defense work carries further: a well-supported suppression motion, a tightly documented sentencing presentation, or a credible trial posture is not lost in the volume of a mega-district docket. We build each case file as if the Tenth Circuit will read it — because in the cases that matter most, it eventually does.
Applied Insight: Wyoming sentenced 179 federal defendants in FY2024 — a number some urban districts clear in a month. Small dockets cut both ways: prosecutors have time to prepare each case thoroughly, but so does the defense, and judges have the bandwidth to actually engage with individualized sentencing arguments. A defense team that brings the court real mitigation, supported and specific, is working in the format this district rewards.
What Federal Prosecutors Charge in Wyoming
The U.S. Attorney’s Office entered the summer of 2026 under confirmed leadership: Darin D. Smith was confirmed by the Senate on May 18, 2026 — succeeding Mark A. Klaassen in the four-year office, per congress.gov — and sworn in on May 28, 2026, per the Justice Department. The office prosecutes statewide from Cheyenne, and its press releases show a steady emphasis on drug-trafficking organizations, violent crime on the Wind River Reservation, and fraud.
The Sentencing Commission’s FY2024 packet for the district counts 179 people sentenced: drug trafficking 63 (35.2 percent), firearms 34 (19.0 percent), immigration 21 (11.7 percent) — and then a number that distinguishes Wyoming from nearly every district east of it: assault at 14 cases, 7.8 percent of the docket against a 1.5 percent national share, with sexual-abuse and child-exploitation cases also elevated. That pattern reflects federal jurisdiction over major crimes in Indian country: serious offenses arising on the Wind River Reservation are prosecuted federally in this court, a docket the U.S. Attorney’s Office and FBI publicly prioritize.
The white-collar docket is small — six fraud sentencings in FY2024 — but its character is distinctly Wyoming: energy and investment schemes. A federal jury here convicted the defendants in the NuTech Energy Resources securities-fraud case, with prison sentences imposed in 2022, and a Lander man received 63 months for wire fraud involving CARES Act funds, both per the U.S. Attorney’s Office. For anyone facing an investment- or energy-fraud investigation in Wyoming, those cases carry two lessons: this office will try a securities case to a jury, and pandemic-era fraud enforcement reached even the least populous state.
Appeals and Post-Conviction Matters
Every District of Wyoming conviction carries the right to review in the Tenth Circuit, but the door closes fast — Appellate Rule 4(b) makes the notice of appeal due 14 days after judgment enters, full stop. Because Wyoming itself produces relatively few published federal decisions, the issues on a Wyoming appeal are usually framed by circuit-wide precedent; on compassionate-release appeals, for example, the Tenth Circuit applies the multi-step framework it articulated in United States v. McGee — analysis we brief regularly across the circuit. That circuit work is not abstract for us: Elizabeth Franklin-Best appeared as counsel in United States v. Joseph, 108 F.4th 1273 (10th Cir. 2024), one of more than 100 federal appeals she has handled across all twelve circuits.
Collateral review stays home: a motion under 28 U.S.C. § 2255 attacking a District of Wyoming judgment is filed in this district, ordinarily before the original sentencing judge, and our federal post-conviction practice — together with compassionate release work — exists precisely for that litigation. These remedies are paper-driven and law-driven; what a client in Wyoming needs is not a lawyer down the street but a brief the court cannot ignore. The bar is high — the Sentencing Commission put the national compassionate-release grant rate at just 14.1 percent in fiscal year 2025 — so a motion that succeeds is one built on a genuinely extraordinary and compelling record, meticulously documented.
How the Firm Practices in This Court
Wyoming’s admission structure is spelled out in its Local Rule 84.2. Full admission under Rule 84.2(a) is reserved for members of the Wyoming Supreme Court’s bar, so out-of-state counsel proceed under Rule 84.2(b): pro hac vice admission on a written motion filed by an attorney who belongs to both the Wyoming State Bar and this court’s bar, with a $100 per-case fee — and counsel who has appeared in the district before simply files an entry of appearance. We handle that association as a standard part of opening a Wyoming engagement.
The substance of the case never depends on it. A Wyoming federal prosecution rises or falls on the same Title 18 elements, the same Sentencing Guidelines, and the same Tenth Circuit and Supreme Court precedent we litigate in every other district — and the thinner the local case law, as it is in a small district, the more the outcome depends on counsel’s command of that national body of law.
Elizabeth Franklin-Best’s admissions span the U.S. Supreme Court and all twelve circuit courts of appeals, the Tenth Circuit among them. Companion guides in this circuit cover the District of Colorado, the District of Utah, and the District of New Mexico.
Frequently Asked Questions
What court handles federal criminal cases in Wyoming?
The United States District Court for the District of Wyoming, which covers the entire state from courthouses in Cheyenne and Casper, with a court office at Mammoth inside Yellowstone National Park. By statute the district also includes the portions of Yellowstone lying in Montana and Idaho.
Who are the judges of the District of Wyoming?
As of mid-2026, the court is led by Chief Judge Kelly H. Rankin, joined by Judge Scott W. Skavdahl and Judges Alan B. Johnson and Nancy D. Freudenthal, who continue to hear cases after decades of service. Chief Magistrate Judge Scott P. Klosterman sits in Cheyenne, Magistrate Judge Stephanie A. Hambrick sits at Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone, and part-time magistrate judges serve Casper and Lander.
Who prosecutes federal crimes in the District of Wyoming?
The United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Wyoming, based in Cheyenne. Darin D. Smith leads the office: the Senate confirmed him on May 18, 2026, and he was sworn in on May 28, 2026. The office’s public enforcement record emphasizes drug trafficking, violent crime arising on the Wind River Reservation, and fraud.
What is the Zone of Death in Yellowstone?
It is the nickname legal scholars gave the small, uninhabited Idaho strip of Yellowstone National Park, which Congress placed in the District of Wyoming. Because the Sixth Amendment promises a jury from both the state and the district where a crime occurred, commentators have questioned how a jury could ever be drawn for that strip. The puzzle is real on paper but academic in practice — no court has ever dismissed a prosecution on that basis, and crimes in the park are routinely prosecuted in this district.
Does the District of Wyoming really include parts of Montana and Idaho?
Yes. Under 28 U.S.C. § 131, the district consists of Wyoming plus the portions of Yellowstone National Park that extend into Montana and Idaho, which makes it the only federal judicial district whose territory crosses state lines. The court even maintains a staffed location at Mammoth, the park headquarters, where a magistrate judge sits.
Which appeals court covers the District of Wyoming?
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, sitting in Denver, which also hears appeals from Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Utah. A criminal notice of appeal is generally due 14 days after entry of judgment.
How does a federal criminal case proceed in the District of Wyoming?
Investigation comes first — often surfacing as agent interviews, a grand jury subpoena, or a target letter — followed by indictment, an initial appearance before a magistrate judge, pretrial litigation, and resolution by plea or trial, then sentencing. Wyoming’s docket is small: 179 people were sentenced in fiscal year 2024, and five cases went to trial, so each case gets genuine attention from the court and the government alike.
Can an out-of-state lawyer represent me in the District of Wyoming?
Yes. The court’s Local Rule 84.2(b) admits attorneys who are members in good standing of another state’s bar pro hac vice, case by case, on a written motion filed by local counsel admitted to the Wyoming State Bar and this court, with a modest per-case fee. Lawyers who have appeared in the district before file an entry of appearance instead.
Does the firm handle federal cases in the District of Wyoming?
Yes. Working with Wyoming local counsel under the court’s pro hac vice rule, we defend federal investigations and prosecutions in this district, and we litigate Tenth Circuit appeals and post-conviction challenges to District of Wyoming judgments. It begins with a paid, one-hour initial consultation.
Where is the federal courthouse in Wyoming?
The District of Wyoming is headquartered at the Joseph C. O’Mahoney Federal Center and courthouse at 2120 Capitol Avenue in Cheyenne, and it holds court in Casper as well. The court also maintains a staffed location at Mammoth Hot Springs, the historic headquarters inside Yellowstone National Park, where a magistrate judge sits. By statute the district’s seats also include Evanston, Lander, Jackson, and Sheridan.
Are crimes committed in Yellowstone prosecuted in federal court?
Yes. Yellowstone National Park is federal land under exclusive federal jurisdiction, and 28 U.S.C. § 131 places the entire park — including the portions in Montana and Idaho — in the U.S. District Court for the District of Wyoming. Offenses in the park, from petty violations to serious felonies, are charged as federal cases in this district, with a magistrate judge stationed at Mammoth inside the park.
Talk With a Federal Criminal Defense Lawyer
Federal trouble in Wyoming rarely waits — agents move, grand juries sit, and the 14-day appeal clock spares no one. Our paid, one-hour initial consultation is where we take the measure of your situation in this district, from the evidence and the likely charges to the judge, the data, and the path we would fight for.