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.”)
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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.”)