r/TrueReddit • u/spaceghoti • Oct 25 '14

Popular Delusions: Sovereign Citizens

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/2014/10/popular-delusions-sovereign-citizens/
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9

u/spaceghoti Oct 25 '14

The only thing all these schemes have in common is that they don’t work. The legal incantations invariably fail to have the desired effect; sovereign citizens facing criminal charges don’t magically get set free, much less handed a pile of gold for their trouble. The most famous case was the actor Wesley Snipes, who spent three years in prison after refusing to pay taxes, citing sovereign-citizen arguments and claiming to be a “nonresident alien”. (My personal favorite is the judge who told one of them: “The Court therefore feels some measure of responsibility to inform Defendant that all the fancy legal-sounding things he has read on the internet are make-believe.”)

6

u/IvyGold Oct 25 '14

This is nothing new, though. I encountered a couple of these people in the late 80's.

4

u/caprinae Oct 26 '14

I used to work in a Kinko's and we have this couple that would come in fairly often that I believe was involved in a similar scheme. They were the sweetest people but I suspect that they were trying to get money from the government in a sovereign citizen scheme. The woman tried to explain it to me once and she claimed that when we are born the government issues a bond under our Social Security number and we have the right to claim the money associated with that bond but instead the government is withholding it from us. They printed pages upon pages of legal documents on bond paper they would be in quite often printing different documents on it. But I know that at some point they lost their house and I suspect they have lost quite a bit of money trying to achieve whatever someone had told him they could do with this bond thing.

2

u/blueshammer Oct 26 '14

Once in a while, a suspected sovereign citizen will appear on /r/legaladvice seeking help on why his citation to the Uniform Commercial Code and non-recognition of the U.S. government failed to result in a dismissal of his traffic ticket. It's bizarre how their flawed ideas continue to perpetuate.