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
