The gist of the story,,,
Jerry Adrian was a prominent Sioux Falls businessman for almost 50 years, respected for his work ethic and reliability.
He was a community leader, known for a generous heart, a commitment to children and adherence to his Christian faith.
By the time he died last year, the Adrian name had become known for something else: tax evasion and a fringe ideology known as the sovereign citizen movement. The founder of Adrian Sod was charged with conspiracy to defraud the U.S. for a decade-long failure to pay taxes he had refused to recognize as legitimate.
His son, Jared Adrian, was given an 11-month prison sentence last week for following in his father’s unlawful business practices.
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Before his arrest for tax evasion, Jerry Adrian and a former pastor named Ray Ehrman filed lawsuits citing a hodgepodge of legal doctrines to reclaim land that the sod dealer once had presented as a gift to a Christian counseling center.
He wanted the property back to establish a headquarters for “The Republic of South Dakota,” a group of believers who claim authority for themselves.
“We tried to talk him out of it,” said his brother, Jim Adrian. “You just couldn’t.”
Some of the claims of the movement,,,
Officials in South Dakota say the sovereign philosophy is more long-standing, prominent and problematic than might people might realize.
A Minneapolis man named Byron Dale who lectures on how to “break the bonds of economic servitude” has his roots in a mortgage protest. He fought foreclosure of his ranch in Timber Lake in the 1980s.
The Legislature passed a law in 1997 against the filing of counterfeit liens. It states that “lack of belief in the jurisdiction or authority of the state or of the United States is no defense to a prosecution,” in part as a response to the movement’s tactics.
The Adrian case, among others, shows that the thinking still thrives.
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Ray Ehrman of Freeman, a former clergyman and truck driver, doesn’t like the term “sovereign citizen.” He was indicted on conspiracy charges alongside the Adrians, but the charges were dropped after Jerry Adrian’s death and his son’s guilty plea.
Sovereign citizen, he argues, is an oversimplification meant to smear the beliefs held by Adrian, Ehrman, Anderson and “hundreds” of others in the South Dakota.
“It’s a buzzword,” Ehrman said. “There’s a sort of guilt by association that happens with that word.”
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Ehrman said he hasn’t filed a tax return since 1984. The U.S. tax code, Ehrman said, has at least 10 different definitions of “United States,” he contends.
“They never did say which United States (Jerry) owed taxes to,” Ehrman said.
Under his interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, the federal government has authority to impose income taxes only on the District of Columbia.
Ehrman, like many who espouse sovereign citizen beliefs, also claims there’s significance in the punctuation of “citizen” within the U.S. Constitution.
It’s spelled with an upper case letter in the earlier Amendments, but with a lower case letter from the Fourteenth Amendment on. The Fourteenth Amendment created a new class of citizen, they believe, separate from the sovereign, capital C citizens who existed before.
Adrian would point out he was not a corporate fiction — the lower case “citizen” — in legal filings.
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A popular claim is that the government has commoditized citizens through the issuance of birth certificates and uses them in trade agreements with foreign governments. That birth certificates have names written in all caps is meaningful, adherents argue, and writing a name in lower case letters in legal documents is a way to distinguish one’s self from the “fictional” person cited by the government.
“It’s saying ‘the rules don’t apply because I’m a different kind of citizen. Because I’m a capital C citizen, you’re not the boss of me,’” Levin said.
In South Dakota, the beliefs lead to headaches for authorities and difficulties collecting on debts.
SD men typified anti-tax crusade in their crimes - starherald.com: Regional/Statewide
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