Readers of our police reports may note the unusually high number of fictitious license plates in traffic stops. Sometimes these traffic stops escalate into more serious charges when a driver who is lawfully detained for a traffic violation winds up getting into a fight with police officers, which can lead to additional charges of resisting arrest.

While anti-government sentiment is as old as the American republic, the term of a “sovereign citizen” first appeared in the early 1970s within “Posse Comitatus,” a loosely organized American far-right, anti-government movement that first emerged in the 1960s and denounced income tax, debt-based currency and debt collection as tools of Jewish control, as taught by Christian Identity minister William Potter Gale and fellow leader Henry Beach.

Posse Comitatus members created pseudo-legal concepts rooted in the purported authority of “natural law” and English “Common Law” they alleged supersede the American legal system.

“Sovereign citizens” came to public attention after the 1992 Ruby Ridge standoff, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the 1996 Montana Freemen standoff, whose members cited many of the same beliefs as modern “sovereigns.”

By the 1990s, “Posse Comitatus” and the “militia movement” was supplanted by the benign “sovereign citizen.”

Sovereign citizens have tried to backfill history to support the pseudo-legal arguments, citing

• gold confiscation in 1933, creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913
• passage of the 16th Amendment in 1913 and an alleged “secret clause” or
• the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871 passed during the Reconstruction Era following the Civil War.

They often cite a combination that they claim established a “corporate United States” and “corporate” legal status for American citizens, independent from physical persons.

By cancelling the “corporate” person though convoluted legal filings, they claim they are a physical person subject only to the Constitution and thus “freed” from their alleged “corporate” personhood. Yet the idea of separate corporate entity has been rejected in every court in the United States.

Sovereign citizens often invoke the Constitution to protect their rights while simultaneously arguing the Constitution and subsequent federal laws do not apply to them. In traffic cases, sovereigns claim that they are not “driving” but “traveling” and are therefore exempt from traffic and driver’s licensing laws.

Courts have uniformly held that states have the authority to regulate vehicles public roads, regardless of what it’s called.

Sovereigns sometimes argue that “admiralty law” has replaced legitimate constitutional, federal or state law, claiming this is supposedly signaled by gold-fringed flags in courtrooms. No court has found that a decorative fringe on a flag changes the legal jurisdiction of a courtroom from constitutional to admiralty law.

Sovereign citizens use a unique set of markers in legal documents, though they are not uniform as there are as many variations as there are sovereign citizens.

• They add “under threat, duress, and coercion” or the initials “TDC” after their name or mailing address when signing official documents to signify they are not signing voluntarily
• believe writing names all capital letters in legal documents denotes a fictitious “corporate” person
• use colons, semi-colons and hyphens in their written names
• create or use their own driver’s licenses and license plates
• file bogus property liens against government officials
• use a constructed language created by David Wynn Miller called “Parse-Syntax-Grammar,” “Correct-Language” or “Quantum Grammar” hoping a special combination of words, punctuation, paper or ink color which allegedly guarantees success in legal proceedings
• sign documents with blood or red ink thumbprints to declare their sovereignty
• often refuse to provide ID during traffic stops
• file extensive legal filings signals their sovereignty
• refuse Social Security numbers, vehicle registration and other forms of government ID
• believe the government has created secret US Treasury accounts in their name that they can tap into through complex documents
• claim a flag known as “the flag of peace” or “Title 4 flag” is the true flag of the United States.

In one recently ruling involving a Sedona resident espousing sovereign citizen ideology in court filings, federal District Court Judge Michael Liburdi denied a petition for writ of habeas corpus, writing, “For decades, claims of the sovereign citizen ilk have been repeatedly dismissed for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction and as frivolous or meritless, … ‘Sovereign citizen’ arguments were ‘completely without merit’ and ‘patently frivolous’ … having ‘no conceivable validity in American law. … [And] legal theories espoused by sovereign citizens have been consistently rejected as ‘utterly frivolous, patently ludicrous, and a waste of … the court’s time.’”

What’s really sad is that many of “sovereign citizen” adherents double down on these claims in court only to find themselves in more legal trouble, facing steeper fines, jail sentences and wasted money on legal filings.