听众信箱：美国何处可以合法赌博？

choi

本文通过一路BBS站telnet客户端发布

VOA Chinese, Jan. 14, 2010.
http://www1.voanews.com/chinese/news/mailbox/Mailbox-070-GAMING-IN-USA-20100114-81559492.html
("海上豪华游轮上也有赌场。不过，轮船要驶离岸边3海里，进入'国际水域'才能开赌
。")

My comment:
(a) I was most surprised by the quotation, as international waters lie 12
nautical miles--not 3--from shore. I thought VOA made a huge mistake. It
does not.
(b) Wikipedia has two entries related to this issue.

(i) Three-mile limit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-mile_limit
("The three-mile limit refers to a traditional and now largely obsolete
conception of the international law of the seas which defined a country's
territorial waters, for the purposes of trade regulation and exclusivity, as
extending as far as the reach of cannons fired from land. * * * [The 1982
United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea formalized extension to 12
nautical miles (22 km) from a coastline.] As a result, the three-mile limit
has become largely obsolete. As of 2007, only Gibraltar, Jordan, Palau, and
Singapore retain it.")

(ii) Gambling ship
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling_ship
("Under the old three-mile limit of territorial waters they were anchored
usually just over three nautical miles off the United States coastline to
avoid governmental interference. * * * When territorial waters were
redefined to 12 nm, this made the prospect of maintaining a gambling ship by
any means extremely impractical.")

The last clause is very ambiguous.

(c) It turned out that litigation was required to clarify

United States v One Big Six Wheel, 166 F3d 498 (CA 2, 1999)
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=2nd&navby=case&no=986028
(affirming 987 F.Supp. 169, 182 (E.D.N.Y.1997))

Paragraph 1: "The Gambling Ship Act, codified at 18 U.S.C. §§ 1081-1084 (
1994), prohibits offshore gaming except on certain voyages beyond "the
territorial waters of the United States." 18 U.S.C. § 1081; see  18 U.S.C.
§ 1082. This in  rem  civil forfeiture action, brought by the United States
against a shipboard gambling device, requires us to decide whether the
recent expansion of 'federal criminal jurisdiction' from three to twelve
nautical miles--by section 901(a) of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death
Penalty Act of 1996 ('AEDPA'), Pub. L. No. 104-132, § 901(a), 110 Stat.
1214, 1317 (1996), reprinted  in  18 U.S.C.A. § 7, Hist. & Stat. Notes (
West Supp. 1998)--has implicitly amended the Gambling Ship Act in such a way
as to criminalize casino gambling (conducted on a so-called cruise-to-
nowhere) between three and twelve nautical miles at sea.

the last two sentences: "Given the plain language of AEDPA and the Gambling
Ship Act, we read both terms consistently. For purposes of the Gambling Ship
Act, until Congress says otherwise, the 'territorial waters' extend three
nautical miles from the U.S. coastline.

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