Against the grain, against the law | News – Aspen Daily News

Many volumes of books containing legal precedent from state and federal criminal and civil cases line the walls of the Pitkin County Courthouses district courtroom.

Pitkin County District Judge Chris Seldin regularly reminds defendants of their rights in his courtroom especially their right to remain silent and their right to an attorney.

It gets tricky, though, when defendants dont acknowledge his jurisdiction to oversee a case.

They may be part of a fringe group known as sovereign citizens though they often wont actually call themselves as such, preferring freemen or state citizens or any other number of names. Sovereign citizens subscribe to a belief that by not consenting to be governed, the government doesnt actually have any jurisdiction over their actions, especially when it comes to taxes and property.

As such, many sovereign citizens are wary of any perceived contract, often believing that a Social Security card or birth certificate are nefarious contracts literally enslaving you to the state. Further, because they fervently believe that renouncing such binds is the first step toward sovereignty, theyre often not keen on having others speak for them in a courtroom.

Isaac Brehm is one such example. He made headlines in March when he and another man were arrested for squatting for about three months in an Aspen house valued at nearly $3.6 million. Brehm has become somewhat notorious in the Pitkin County Courthouse, however, not because of the charges he faces which include six felonies ranging from burglary to vehicular theft but because of his insistence on representing himself.

He has the sovereign citizen idea in his head, and its not going to serve him, Deputy District Attorney Don Nottingham said outside the courtroom before Brehms preliminary hearing in July.

Brehm challenged the legitimacy of that hearing before it began, despite being the one who had requested it (a preliminary hearing is a right, not a requirement in the criminal justice process).

My proof of claims, Brehm started. I cant remember exactly the language, but basically asking for proof of claim from all parties.

For reference, he submitted a file hed presumably found on the internet.

To the extent that youre asking for information concerning the jurisdiction of the court, its your job to do the research on that. Ive already told you, the court believes it has jurisdiction to handle this case. I have no doubt about that, in fact, Seldin said, perusing the document Brehm had handed him.

It was clear that Seldin was familiar with the argument presented.

In terms of the legal basis for the courts jurisdiction, youll have to go do that research yourself, since you decided to represent yourself as the defendant in this case. With respect to your rights, Ive already advised you of your rights in this case, he continued.

I object, your Honor, Brehm retorted. Pretty much, youre saying I can go find this information, but a lot of this information Im asking for, I cannot just go find. I object. Id like to at least read this on the record.

At that, Seldins patience reached its capacity.

That request is going to be denied because that would be a waste of time and judicial resources. It will be admitted into the record as a filing by you, he stated flatly.

Brehm, equal parts frustrated and deflated, said for the record that this was pretty much blown off.

It happens in courtrooms all across the country, Nottingham said.

It is a not uncommon thing for defendants to look this stuff up on the internet and think that these are valid defenses, he said.

A strawman for everyone

Those defenses become very particular. Essentially, most sovereign citizens believe that at some point in American history, a corporation secretly acquired the United States before going bankrupt. Desperate to offset its losses, that corporation offered American citizens as collateral to financiers. It accomplished this by creating a strawman for every person; that is, the paper trail of a persons citizenship such as a birth certificate.

Even more specifically, many sovereign citizens believe that the government funds a secret bank account for each strawman to the tune of $630,000. Others still believe that the Social Security Administration was created to back that $630,000 amount.

This is your alter ego, all-capital letters-written-name strawman, explains the website Jabajabba.com. STRAWMAN is a legal term for a front man, or nominal party to a transaction, transmitting utility, existing in name only, which allows the owner to accomplish some purpose not otherwise permitted.

The strawman is a concept in sovereign citizen circles that describes a supposed shell legal identity for each citizen that is somehow separate from the actual person.

For instance, if a bill comes in the mail, but a persons name is misspelled by a letter, that bill is to the recipients strawman and, the argument goes, there is no legal requirement to pay it. And since paper agreements dont matter, the extremists in the movement will even employ a certain paper terrorism, as prosecutors call it, to clog legal systems, claim illegitimate tax refunds or even threaten law enforcement.

Former Boulder District Attorney Stan Garnett experienced the latter firsthand. In 2015, he was on the receiving end of a targeted intimidation campaign by sovereign citizens. They dubbed themselves the Peoples Grand Jury of Colorado and sent phony arrest warrants often signed with a bloody fingerprint and filed liens against property owned by Colorado public officials.

They became known as the Colorado 8. The ringleader, Bruce Doucette, was sentenced to 38 years in prison in what the Colorado State Attorneys General Office saw as a message to others who would follow suit. Doucette opted to represent himself during his trial.

Since then, district attorneys and police officers all over the state have undergone training on how to recognize and handle a sovereign citizen, including locally. In January last year, the entire Aspen Police Department completed a four-hour online course on the matter through the industry resource center PoliceOne, Sgt. Mike Tracey confirmed.

Nottingham, too, attended a Colorado District Attorneys Council Conference put on by the attorney generals office that featured experts on sovereign citizens, and District Judge John Neiley even compiled a comprehensive document for fellow judges complete with suggestions, such as keeping their signed oath of office at the ready.

And the Colorado Supreme Court has made it very clear that things like calling out the fringe on the flag does not affect the court. There is Colorado constitutional authority and United States constitutional authority to have courts, Nottingham said. Personal jurisdiction is personal jurisdiction; there is no corporate entity, and there are many cases that talk about clerical issues, like if you write a name in all caps versus one capital letters and lowercase letters; theres no difference between those things.

While Nottingham and Seldin seemingly see sovereign citizens in the courtroom every year, Tracey said he could recall maybe one in-field incident in 17 years of police work: Redstone resident Stefan Schutter.

Schutter was part of a group of 12 adults and juveniles in 1999 colloquially known as Aspens Dirty Dozen for a string of armed robberies and burglaries that year. He served about six years of a 10-year sentence that he received after being found guilty in 2000 of aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon and theft. After being released in 2005, he earned himself another 10-year sentence after being found in the possession of an assault rifle, a revolver and a slew of drugs.

Schutter was not pitching the sovereign citizen argument then, but both Tracey and Sgt. Rick Magnuson recall him making that claim when he was arrested for DUI in 2017.

Hes not the only one from that 1999 group who subsequently used some of the sovereign citizen talking points in his defense strategy. Yuri Ognacevic, now 38, was arrested in July for two purse snatchings in Aspen and holding up a concession stand at Theatre Aspen. In his second court appearance in August, he told Seldin that he had every intention of representing himself.

Im well aware of my Sixth Amendment rights to represent myself, he told Seldin in the courtroom. I also have notes on a Supreme Court ruling from 1975, if you would like to hear those.

Though his actions may not be as outright as Brehm reading an actual script, its still a trademark move of a sovereign citizen.

Of the estimated 300,000 people in the United States who at some level subscribe to the ideals espoused in the sovereign citizen movement, only about one-third of them would act on those beliefs, according to a Forbes article by J.J. MacNab, a fellow at the George Washington University Center for Cyber and Homeland Security program on extremism.

Be imaginative. Pull a line from the 1215 version of the Magna Carta, a definition from a 1913 legal dictionary, a quote from a founding father or two, and put it in the blender with some official-sounding Supreme Court case excerpts you found on like-minded websites, she wrote. Et voil, not only have you proven that you dont have to obey the law you dislike, heck, its your patriotic duty to disobey it, and anyone who tells you otherwise is just plain un-American and is probably part of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy to ensure that Chihuahuas are slaves to the U.S. government.

Why is a homeland security and extremism expert writing about sovereign citizens? Because the Federal Bureau of Investigations considers them domestic terrorists.

That does not mean that Isaac Brehm is a terrorist. Seldin treated him more as simply misguided, reading from scripts he didnt comprehend, especially during Brehms closing statements at his preliminary hearing.

Id like to say, you know, pretty much you cant ignore the lack of jurisdiction, and once its challenged, it must be proven. And, uh, you probably know, tax appropriation, he started. Your implied consent is being challenged.

He then went on to list several U.S. codes and sections, eventually even getting into the legal definition of piracy.

Let me stop you there. Were not anywhere near the high seas; were in the Rocky Mountains in the center of the country, alright? Seldin interrupted. Heres my concern: Youre reading from a document that, its not clear to me you actually understand. I dont want to see you getting convicted of a crime that you may or may not have committed solely because you chose to represent yourself and you botched your own defense. Do you understand?

Still, Brehm has opted to persist in his own representation, and his trial is set for January next year.

He tried really hard to help the guy, Nottingham said of Seldin in reflection later.

Sovereign citizens often believe that official documents such as Social Security cards and birth certificates literally enslave people in a contract with the government to which theyre not privy.

Taking it to extremes

More often than not, sovereign citizens are more of Brehms ilk. To this day, Nottingham remembers his first courtroom encounter with the movement.

When I was an intern in Jefferson County dealing with barking dog cases and parking tickets, we had a guy that came in and started about the fringe on the flag and that it must be a court of admiralty and not a court of common law, and I was like, What is he talking about? he said.

The theories that many seeking the Truth return to when dealing with the criminal justice system can be disarming. And that can be dangerous if things do escalate, warns PoliceOne documents.

The threat to officer safety posed by sovereign citizens is well known. One must look no further than the tragic deaths of Sergeant Brandon Paudert and Officer Bill Evans of the West Memphis Police Department in order to understand the risk of spontaneous violence from self-proclaimed sovereign citizens, one article reads.

Again, MacNab estimates that only one-third of an already relatively small group less than .001 percent of the population would act on extremist beliefs, but the beliefs are indeed extreme.

Remember Jabajabba.com? In the side panel of the webpage breaking down the strawman theory, there is a column with links to such literature as The Ancient Giants Who Ruled America and Human Biodiversity and the Hidden Origins of the Caucasian Race.

And while certainly not all proclaimed sovereign citizens would align with white nationalism, the movements history is rooted in it. A group of self-proclaimed Nazi sympathizers who called themselves the Comitatus Posse founded what became the first generation of the sovereign citizen movement, from 1970 to 1995. Perhaps because Comitatus Posse existed in the Pacific Northwest, the broader movement which typically consisted of white, high-school-educated men thrived most in the western part of the country.

Today, sovereign citizens claim almost all socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds. But some of the biggest court cases are still in western states: Cliven and Ammon Bundy, who in an armed standoff occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2014, both used language in media interviews familiar to sovereign citizens. And of course, Doucette and his Colorado 8 still influence current-day training priorities in the state.

Perhaps the geography is coincidental; perhaps its because of the history of the Comitatus Posse. Or maybe its cultural.

Colorado is a sort of libertarian-ish state, Nottingham said. Alaska, Montana, Colorado sort of these Western states that do believe that the authority of the government is derived by the consent of the governed. Thats a foundational aspect of government, of what it is. Thats not individual consent; that is group consent of the government. You dont get to opt out whenever you want. People have tried that before, and they get charged with treason.

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Against the grain, against the law | News - Aspen Daily News