In 2012, Associate Chief Justice J.D. Rooke of the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench had enough of “sovereign citizen” (or “freeman on the land”) bullshit in his courtroom and authored a blistering decision, Meads v. Meads, systematically tearing them apart. The case has been cited hundreds of times in Canada and in courts all over the world, as SovCits continue to embarrass themselves and waste everyone’s time wherever they try this nonsense in front of an actual judge.
The New York Jets might have finally won a game this weekend - and, in classic Jets fashion, may have cost themselves the chance to draft Trevor Lawrence - but sovereign citizens remain winless everywhere.
But they keep coming back. Oh, Lord, do they ever keep coming back. Especially in Alberta, which finds itself the world leader in smacking down pseudo-legal arguments:
In an unusual ruling three months ago, an Alberta judge made it clear Jacquie Robinson was on thin ice.
If she continued to threaten the courts with her bizarre, “pseudo law” claims about the Magna Carta and treasonous judges and governments, the legal system would not sit idly by, promised Justice Robert Graesser of the Court of Queen’s Bench.
As a first step, he banned the woman from continuing to represent a mother embroiled in a bitter child-custody dispute.
It seems Robinson – who likes to go by the pseudonym Jacquie Phoenix – was unmoved.
She responded by sending additional hostile letters to court staff, likening them to war criminals and suggesting that they could be tried and face life in prison.
Meanwhile, some of her movement’s thousands of followers have been peppering other police and government agencies in Canada and the U.K. with similar oddball claims and threats.
Now Graesser has issued a second ruling, one that’s particularly topical as conspiracy theories like QAnon and false claims about the pandemic, vaccines and U.S. election fraud spread widely.
The judge warned generally about the perils of various “fakery” being broadcast over the Internet, where “there are no filters to distinguish between fact and fiction.”
Then he imposed fresh sanctions on Robinson, barring her from representing anyone in the province’s legal system or sending correspondence to the courts claiming authority based on her strange Magna Carta theory.
The judge also suggested she may have broken criminal laws against intimidating justice officials, and threatened to cite her for contempt of court if she didn’t heed his cautions.
“This may appear to be the use of a sledgehammer to crush an ant,” wrote Graesser. “I would instead use the analogy of an inoculation to stop a virus.”
The full decision is here (in PDF format). Surprise surprise, “Jacquie Phoenix” - rapidly becoming well-known in SovCit circles, and with an increasingly cultish following online - is unmoved:
Robinson, who’s in the U.K. meeting with other followers of the movement, was unrepentant when reached Friday, calling the courts a “criminal corporation.”
“My notices are not threatening,” she told the National Post via text. “They state the Law and the penalty for breaking that Law.”
On her group’s Facebook page Robinson warns that her “grand fannaly” (sic) is coming soon. “Greasser are you ready for your arrest?” she wrote about the judge. “We sure are.”
“Grand Fannaly” is one of my favorite Irish folk songs.
It’s easy to dismiss all of this as harmless nonsense, but people who promote sovereign-citizen “legal” theories are causing real harm. In this particular case, the mother who tried to use Robinson/Phoenix as her pseudo-lawyer lost contact with her child altogether:
The mother Robinson represented had wanted greater access to her daughter. Now she’s charged with abducting the girl to the U.S., and is wanted for failing to appear in court.
“After joining with Ms. Robinson and her group, (the mother) no longer has any access to her daughter,” the judge noted.
Tom Blackwell’s National Post article links to a SovCit Facebook group where people are posting letters they’re getting back from courts, governments and corporations in response to their arguments, and wondering why their sophisticated arguments aren’t working. Some of them are kind of funny until you realize that peoples’ safety is in the balance:
The FBI classifies the sovereign citizen movement as a domestic terror threat in the United States, and it’s been linked to several murders of law enforcement officials. I haven’t come across these people in my own legal practice yet, but I feel like it’s just a matter of time.
A persistent debate during the Trump era has been whether relatively normal, sensible people should take jobs in his Administration to keep him from nuking Moldova or something, or that gives Trump more respectability and “normalcy” than he deserves.
Aside from the usual neo-fascists, shills and unqualified family members, some previously respectable people - Mattis, Tillerson, Priebus, Barr - did take positions in Trump’s White House. And it pretty much destroyed all of them. (Tillerson, whom I actually thought was an inspired, out-of-the-box choice choice for Secretary of State, is the one whose book I really want to read.)
So what happens when only the craziest of the crazy are left? We’re about to find out:
With his baseless claims of widespread voter fraud rejected by dozens of judges and GOP leaders, President Trump has turned to a ragtag group of conspiracy theorists, media-hungry lawyers and other political misfits in a desperate attempt to hold on to power after his election loss.
The president’s orbit has grown more extreme as his more mainstream allies, including Attorney General William P. Barr, have declined to endorse his increasingly radical plans to overturn the will of the voters. Trump’s unofficial election advisory council now includes a pardoned felon, adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory, a White House trade adviser and a Russian agent’s former lover.
[…]
After meeting with his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani on Monday, Trump met in the Oval Office with a group of Republicans from the House Freedom Caucus, including Rep.-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a public supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory whose campaign was marked by racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic statements. That was followed by a second meeting in the Cabinet Room among Giuliani, the House lawmakers and Vice President Pence, an administration official said.
Aides said Trump has been searching frantically for pathways to reverse his loss — sidelining officials who try to level with him about it and embracing those claiming to have a solution.
“They dropped hundreds of thousands of ballots in each state. It’s all documented,” the president claimed falsely in a call Monday to a gathering of the pro-Trump youth organization Turning Point USA in West Palm Beach, Fla. “The problem is that we need a party that’s going to fight. And we have some great congressmen and women that are doing it. And we have others, some great fighters. But we won this in a landslide. They know it, and we need backing from — like the Justice Department and other people have to finally step up.”
Greene is among House members who have indicated they would try to challenge congressional certification of the election result on Jan. 6. Trump has been encouraging the move despite its long odds, trying to cajole GOP lawmakers to sign on.
“He is grasping at straws,” one senior administration official said. “If you come in and tell him he lost, and that it’s over, he doesn’t want to hear from you. He is looking for people to tell him what he wants to hear.”
The White House and Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
Monday’s meeting at the White House followed an Oval Office gathering Friday that was one of the most contentious yet of Trump’s seven-week post-election push to reverse his fate.
Gathered around the Resolute Desk on Friday were: Sidney Powell, the lawyer who has promoted a baseless allegation that hostile nations manipulated voting machines to flip votes for Biden; Michael Flynn, the recently pardoned former national security adviser who has publicly suggested invoking martial law to “basically rerun an election”; former Overstock chief executive Patrick Byrne, who now promotes election conspiracy theories; and White House officials including Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Staff Secretary Derek Lyons and Counsel Pat Cipollone. Giuliani joined the meeting by phone.
Axios reports that Vice President Pence is in Trump’s crosshairs, too. In my experience is a lawyer, I find it’s time to release the hounds when a potential new client complains that his or her previous lawyer didn’t “fight” hard enough, so this passage really caught my eye:
Trump views Pence as not fighting hard enough for him — the same complaint he uses against virtually everybody who works for him and has been loyal to him.
Hey, maybe it’s all just a show and he’s blowing off some steam and we’re just overreac-
Sleep tight, Moldova!
Interesting what you find, as James Lileks did, when you look closely at the reviews on Amazon:
The sovereign citizen movement is one more example of people distrusting authority, disavowing the expertise of educated persons who have spent years actually studying their field, and (it seems) even distrusting reality. One would think that anyone involved in a child custody dispute, of all things, would be very careful to choose a lawyer who is well versed in how courts actually work. From what little I saw personally, (Canadian) family court is subjected to way too much personal b-s and irrationality by the people whom it serves, yet produces generally fair outcomes, thanks in no small part to the extreme patience of many judges and lawyers. Solving people’s family issues is not an easy task, and it isn’t made any easier by people who are uncooperative or simply operating outside reality.
But the distrust and disbelief in institutions such as the courts, in education, medicine and science, and the wider tendency to disregard facts and common sense in favour of simply making up the rules seems to be much more widespread, as exemplified by current events in US politics. Canada is not immune to this. We should be asking ourselves about what’s going on and how to correct it before it spreads (more widely) here as well.
Amazon reviews are often not even about the product in question. If you see “this camera is fantastic” underneath a product description of a keyboard or an egg beater, ye know with fannality that something’s fishy.
[exit humming “The Irish Rover”]