A woman who considers herself a “constitutional activist” was convicted yesterday of assaulting a Columbus police officer, after a weeklong trial in which she defended herself and argued that she was the victim of an unlawful, tyrannical judicial system.
“The law itself is on trial,” Monica Greer Justice told a Franklin County jury in her closing argument.
The Common Pleas jury found Justice guilty of assaulting an officer as he tried to arrest her on a warrant during a March 17 arraignment in Franklin County Municipal Court, where she was appearing on misdemeanor traffic offenses.
Jurors deliberated for just more than an hour after hearing testimony from 11 witnesses over parts of five days.
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“They don’t understand the Constitution,” Justice, who gave a post-office box for her address and uses “Lotus” as her first name, said of the jurors after the verdict. “And they don’t understand that these courts aren’t being run according to the Constitution.”
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In her closing argument, Justice told jurors that she was peacefully resisting an unlawful arrest and that “police powers are an invention of the judiciary.”
What happened to her, she said, was the same “tyranny, absolutism and despotism” that her ancestors left Europe to escape.
Woman who railed against ‘tyranny’ found guilty of assaulting officer in courtroom | The Columbus Dispatch
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