UPDATE::'Sovereign citizen' given 7 years in prison - Chicago Tribune

Cherron Phillips seemed to waver moments after a federal judge sentenced her to seven years in prison Tuesday for filing a series of bogus multibillion-dollar liens on top court officials.

Phillips, a devotee of the sovereign citizen movement that doesn't accept court rules, told U.S. District Judge Michael Reagan she was confused. She wanted the advice of her court-appointed attorney, a lawyer she'd previously refused to cooperate with and flat-out ignored during her trial.

"I'd like to speak to Miss ..." Phillips said in a quiet voice that trailed off.

"Solomon," Reagan reminded her.

[,,,]
The judge was not swayed, however. His sentence was beyond the recommended federal guidelines and six months more than what even prosecutors had requested.

In his ruling, Reagan called Phillips' attempts to harass and intimidate public officials "death by a thousand paper cuts." He also noted that she continued her campaign even as her trial approached, sending letters to him and to prosecutors naming them as defendants in a lawsuit purportedly filed in Washington.

In asking Reagan to consider probation, Solomon said the sovereign citizen ideology is driven by a deep-rooted mistrust of the justice system and only inflamed in prison by those who feel that the weight of the government is stacked against them.

"Can we really solve this problem with incarceration?" Solomon said. "How powerless do they feel, in the face of the overwhelming power of the federal government … to have to go to this ideology that is nonsensical at best?"


'Sovereign citizen' given 7 years in prison - Chicago Tribune

ADDENDUM::Cherron Phillips: Chicago’s sovereign citizen ‘paper terrorist’ and her NBA secret

Tony Ortega lays out the back-story on a fascinating, if not "unusual," Sovereign Citizen case that has sucked in a whole family and numerous prominent Chicagoans.

As Ortega notes toward the end of his piece,

“The whole family is educated and successful — the extended family, who didn’t buy into the sovereign citizen thing. These aren’t people who are desperate. These are highly educated, successful, middle class pillars of the community,” Solomon says.

[,,,]
“None of it makes sense. This woman has risked everything for a really ridiculous ideology. Her parents did it. Her brother did it. And it all started with her brother. Four people in this family are going to end up in prison for this incredible ideology. Why do people follow this, when it so obviously is ineffective?”

_____

A woman named Cherron Phillips, 44, was accused of filing maritime liens, each for up to $100 billion, against the property of a who’s who of the Chicago court system. There was the former US Attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald, who had brought down Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich and had also investigated the Valerie Plame affair. There were judges and prosecutors and clerks — and all of them had discovered that Phillips had filed liens against them, claiming that they owed staggering sums of money._

What caught my attention, "And that was another reason why Phillips was so fascinating. She was part of one of the newer segments of the antigovernment movement — African-Americans who call themselves “Moorish” and who also object to the federal government and its laws."

As well as this brief introduction as to how the Moorish Science Temple of America - Moorish Science - has become associated with the perverted legal ramblings of the Sovereign Movement.  It is not the first time that Moorish Science has come up in regards to the Sovereign Movement as I have posted about it before.

The Moorish Science Temple of America was founded in the early 20th Century by a man named Timothy Drew who called himself Noble Drew Ali. His followers claim that they are descended from the Moors of Morocco, and refer to themselves as “Asiatics” as well as “Moorish Scientists.” They tend to give themselves new names with suffixes like El, Bey, Dey, or Ali, which are said to be ancient Moroccan titles.

More recently, Moorish Science has begun to merge with sovereign citizen ideas. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists two Asbury Park, New Jersey men as leaders of the Moorish branch of the sovereign citizen movement. Nature El Bey was formerly known as Lee S. Crudup, but even the SPLC doesn’t know the original identity of Taj Tarik Bey, who calls himself a divine minister of the Moorish Science Temple.

Known for his long, rambling video lectures, Taj Tarik Bey instructs his Moorish followers how to create the kind of confounding court documents that Cherron Phillips was filing in Chicago courtrooms,,,_

Although as the article states, "[n]ot everyone involved in Moorish Science, however, is enamored with Tarik Bey or the sovereign movement’s odd ideas."

Also of note, "She’s also not the only sovereign citizen with a connection to the sports world. In May, TMZ reported that Pilar Sanders, the ex-wife of former NFL player Deion Sanders, appealed a ruling in their divorce claiming that she was a “Moorish National Aboriginal” and not subject to U.S. law. The appeal was dismissed."

Some other noteworthy items from Ortega's article:

• "Phillips was being charged under a relatively new law, 18 U.S. Code § 1521, whose full title is “Retaliating against a Federal judge or Federal law enforcement officer by false claim or slander of title.” It refers specifically to filing liens as retaliation against a federal officer, and carries a penalty of 10 years in prison."

The law was passed in 2008 as a reaction to the sovereign citizen movement. The first person charged under it, in 2009, was Daniel E. Petersen, one of the original members of the Montana Freemen.

Petersen had targeted federal judges who had overseen prosecutions of Montana Freemen members in the 1990s. Petersen himself had been sentenced to 15 years for bank fraud and armed robbery.

While in prison, he targeted three judges with liens on their properties, and offered to pay a bounty for their arrest.

Petersen was found guilty under the new law and had seven and a half years added to his previous sentence, which was about to run out.

• "During trial, Lauren Solomon advanced the defense that Cherron’s liens, as bizarre as they were, really didn’t harm anyone."

“They weren’t even aware of it. They weren’t aware that these liens existed until one person discovered it and then told everyone else,” she says.

The documents Phillips filed were nonsensical, but the act of filing them, as retaliation, is what has her facing a decade in prison.

Herein lays the problem with these "paper terrorists" as Lorelei Laird explains.

These beliefs may sound silly, but sovereigns can be difficult to laugh off. For one thing, even though they don’t believe they’re subject to laws, they use laws as weapons. The FBI has called sovereigns “paper terrorists” because they so often fight perceived enemies—generally public employees—by filing false liens, false tax documents or spurious lawsuits. These can hurt the victim’s credit, stymie attempts to sell or refinance property, and take years and thousands in legal fees to correct.

The trouble doesn’t stop there. When involved in any legal matter, from pet licensing to serious criminal charges, sovereigns are known for filing legal-sounding gibberish, usually pro se, learned from other sovereigns who sell lessons in “law” online. Frequently, they cite the Uniform Commercial Code, maritime law and the Bible.

They’re also known for the sheer volume of their filings, which can double the size of a normal docket. This can frustrate and delay courts as they consider the defendant’s competence and otherwise try to minimize disruptions. With many court systems fighting heavy caseloads and budget cuts, these extra headaches are unwelcome.

In other words besides the actual target(s) of the Sovereign, we the taxpayer get to foot the bill.  Contrary to popular opinion, these are not some whack-jobs trying to "just get out of" paying a ticket.  Although at times it may seem that way.  The actions of a Sovereign have very real consequences.

Nevertheless, sovereign ideas can create real problems for the legal system. For one thing, even when sovereigns are genuinely trying to participate in a case, they’re often disruptive. Because they believe their own legal system is the only legitimate one—and because they frequently resent authorities they feel are not legitimate—they have trouble cooperating with even the most basic of requirements.

• We asked Solomon if, while she’s preparing for sentencing, she’d found any cases that were similar to Cherron’s.

She pointed us to a case out of South Dakota: A man named Gregory Davis, who claimed to be part of an unrecognized Indian tribe, was unhappy that another member of the tribe, Michael Reed, was being prosecuted on a firearms charge. So he retaliated against the judge in the case with a $3.4 million lien. Davis and Reed were convicted for conspiring to retaliate against the judge. Reed, who had other charges against him, was sentenced in 2011 to 9 years in prison. Davis, who only filed the lien, received three years and five months, plus three years of supervised probation. It’s the only case Solomon says she’s been able to find where a person was convicted for retaliating with a lien on behalf of another person, as Cherron was attempting to do for her brother.

I understand that Solomon has to put the best spin on her client, and her clients actions; but I beg to differ. "Is Cherron a danger to society?” Solomon asks. “Are the liens enough to send someone to prison for seven to eight years? Obviously, she’s not a criminal. She has not spent her life engaging in criminal conduct. She’s not a drug dealer. She’s not a bank robber. She’s not a fraudster. She’s a misguided individual.”

As JJ McNab over at Forbes points out, people had that thought in regards to Joseph Stack as well.

Sovereign citizens are true believers. They generally entered the movement by buying into a scam or conspiracy theory that not only promised them a quick fix to their problems, but wrapped such solutions in a heavy layer of revolutionary rhetoric. Once a sovereign feels the flush of excitement and self-importance that comes from acting as the David to the U.S. government’s Goliath, they know, with all of their hearts and souls, that their research is correct, that their cause is just, and that anyone who disagrees with them is a criminal who deserves to be punished.

These sovereign citizens are also doomed to failure; the tax collector, prosecutor, and judge have all heard these same legal theories dozens of times already and understand that they are bogus.
When a person believes his cause is just, yet he meets failure over and over and over again, there comes a point where he has to make a decision: he can admit his theory is wrong and walk away, or he can fight dirty.

Non-violent retaliation against government employees and law enforcement is the most common response, and can take the form of filing false liens, filing bogus Forms 1099, sending threatening correspondence, suing government employees for millions of dollars, and cyber-stalking individuals in government who disagree with the sovereign’s legal theories.

Some sovereigns plot a violent revenge, hoping to inspire others in the movement to reach their breaking point sooner. For example, after twenty years of attempting to persuade the IRS and the Tax Court that his blender salad of legal theories was accurate, in 2010, private pilot Joseph Stack flew his airplane into an IRS building in Austin Texas, killing one tax collector, and injuring thirteen others.

“I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different. I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.” — Joseph Stack’s suicide note

Cherron Phillips: Chicago’s sovereign citizen ‘paper terrorist’ and her NBA secret

'Sovereign citizen' follower convicted in federal court in Chicago - chicagotribune.com

Hours before being convicted Wednesday of slapping bogus multibillion-dollar liens on top federal court officials, Cherron Phillips was up to her usual tricks.

While the jury deliberated at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse, Phillips, an alleged follower of the anti-government sovereign citizen movement, went to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals six floors above the trial courtroom to try to enter an emergency appeal claiming she was beyond the court’s jurisdiction.

And the night before, she’d filed a letter alleging her court-appointed attorney had “joined the judge and prosecutors in the conspiracy for slavery” and that she refused to consent to the proceedings, court records show.

On Wednesday, the years of frivolous court motions and often bizarre behavior caught up with Phillips as a federal jury convicted her of 10 counts of retaliation against a federal official by filing false claims.

Following the verdict, U.S. District Judge Michael Reagan ordered Phillips taken into custody, calling her “a paper terrorist” who “will continue on her misguided bent” if he allowed her to remain free until her sentencing in October.

[,,,]
Phillips’ odd trial featured a star-studded list of witnesses that included former U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and also cast a spotlight on the tactics of those who claim to be sovereign citizens, an anti-government movement whose adherents often file nonsensical, complex legal documents and refuse to accept or follow court rules.

The movement has garnered increasing attention in Chicago’s federal court system, where recent defendants such as Joseph Banks, a bank robber who made a daring escape from the federal highrise jail in the Loop, have claimed to be devotees. For more than two years, courthouse security officers have tailed Phillips around the federal courthouse whenever she has appeared on her case.

Among the victims who testified about Phillips’ liens was U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow, whose husband and mother were slain in 2005 by a crazed litigant, leading to a greater sensitivity for the security of federal officials in Chicago.

'Sovereign citizen' follower convicted in federal court in Chicago - chicagotribune.com