Introduction

Venue and Transfer in Criminal Cases

Introduction

A defendant charged with a crime in a distant place has two separate questions to ask about where the trial will be held. The first is where the prosecution could be brought in the first place. The second is whether a case brought in a permissible place should be moved anyway. Law students tend to run these questions together, but different sources answer them. The Constitution answers the first. Article III, section 2 requires that the trial of all crimes be held in the State where the crimes were committed.¹ The Sixth Amendment adds that the jury must come from "the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed."² Read together, these two texts form the crime-committed rule, which fixes the baseline place of trial.

The place of trial is called venue, meaning the physical location or judicial district in which the prosecution takes place.³ The law cares about it for two reasons that point the same way. The first is fairness to the accused, who should not be required to submit to trial in a remote location. The second is accuracy in fact-finding, because a trial held where the relevant witnesses and circumstances are available gives the jury better evidence to work with.⁴ The crime-committed rule serves both aims at once, since the place where an offense occurred is ordinarily where its witnesses and physical evidence are found.

The baseline can still give way. A defendant who has been properly charged in one district may ask for the case to be moved, and Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 21 supplies the mechanism. The two basic grounds are local prejudice, typically produced by pretrial publicity, and the convenience of the parties and witnesses together with the interests of justice.⁵ Because the constitutional baseline reflects a deliberate judgment about where criminal trials belong, transfer operates as a controlled departure from it, with its own standards, its own decision-maker, and its own timing rules. This chapter follows that order, moving from the constitutional baseline to the two Rule 21 grounds and then to the mechanics of filing a motion and carrying out a transfer. The first step is the baseline itself, and it begins by separating venue from two neighboring ideas, jurisdiction and vicinage, that are easy to confuse with it.