i dunno - defense attorney advice, at least for California, seems to be that the police can search your car after a traffic stop arrest; I don’t know if there’s still outdated advice floating around based on Thornton v. U.S., or they think the circumstances covered by Arizona v Gant are narrow enough that cops generally can search cars, or it’s basically moot if the cops impound the vehicle (because the inventory search is legal).
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The video:
Scene 1: The stop. The arrest.
Scene 2: Hand-held camera walked up to her front door, then into her house, and sitting on her kitchen table is a Tomahawk missile because… sovereign citizen.
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So have I. And I have much sympathy for people who have to deal with them in the course of their everyday business but being an asshole isn’t actually a cuffable offence.
Or it shouldn’t be. And cuffing someone for denying they were committing an offence with some stupid excuse should not be seen as restraint but rather as overreach and an expectation that violent escalation of a situation is the correct option.
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Once upon a time I believed there was some rationality to how Constiutional law worked and that practitioners thereof were following some sort of objective plan based on scholarly study of the Constitution. But given the status of the Supreme Court it is pretty much clear that Constitutional law is ultimately “whatever crap a majority of ‘justices’ believe”. The currenr bunch don’t appear to believe in the “sovereign citizen” myth, but it isn’t like that’s crazier than some of the stuff they do believe.
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Have you read the document that the gave to the BBC, in one of the images from that article? I’d laugh, except they actually believe it is all real.
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If only they had handled Cliven Bundy so expeditiously before the standoff happened.
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Happens as much or more in court as well. These clowns really go at it after the arrest too, doing all their magic phrases in court. It’s a real problem there, because it grinds things to a halt, as judges are wary of trampling on due process rights so some give them way too much leeway, which may be a big part of why they do it. Some judges are better about it than others, but their refusal to play by the normal rules can cause them to get sent for competency evaluations, go through many, many, many lawyers, and turn five minute proceedings into hour long arguments, all of which delays everything and wastes public resources. Canada passed a law that allows courts to recognize when the nonsense is starting and shortcut things, in the US though, ugh.
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Apparently we need similar laws for city council meetings. Some of the Freedom Truckers (I call the “honklers”) have started jamming up the works in at least two small Ontario cities (Pickering in this example):
Not sure how much these overlap with SCs, other than “crazy legal ideas”.
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I was a bit surprised that US police can arrest you without declaring they are arresting you, the provisional charge, and without reading you your rights on arrest. Or did the cop just cuff her “because reasons”?
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He did. It’s very quick after he phones in the “she said she was traveling not driving,” but he tells her that she is “under arrest for failure to identify,” meaning that she did not produce identification when asked by a cop, which is a requirement when operating a vehicle.
The reading you your rights part is a big thing in police procedurals, but they usually do that part back at the station before beginning questioning in real life.
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With “right of free warren on Saturdays”.
Heard on “Round the Horne” or “Beyond our Ken”.
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The British sovcits annoy me more than the US ones. US laws seem to hinge more on the pedantically exact wording, but in the UK it’s much more about the intention of the law. So even if you have genuinely found a loop-hole in the wording of a law, it’s unlikely to get you anywhere.
There’s definitely been a lot of cross pollination from US sovcits with other groups around the world that’s ‘radicalised’ people who were previously just a bit kooky.
I recently found out about the “freemen of the land” types, who’s argument seems to be “we didn’t agree to pay council tax so we won’t”, with the council responding (paraphrased) ‘the government says you have to, and what they say goes’. The state does have a monopoly on violence after all.
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That’s where she will get her phone call too.
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The difference between driving and traveling becomes clear when one considers that one is perfectly free to ride a bus or be a passenger in a car without a driver’s license.
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Back when I lived in Oklahoma City, my neighbor catty corner across the street was a sovereign citizen type, unknown to me at first. This guy ran a junkyard out of his front yard, rarely mowed anything, and tended to get into screaming matches with other people who lived nearby. One day I was working from home (this was like 2009 or something like that) and I could hear a screaming match outside. I got up and walked out onto the front porch to see what the heck was going on, only to see this guy (an old, grizzled white dude) screaming at a group of black people. The N-word was tossed out pretty casually. Then he screamed at the top of his lungs, “I don’t give a f— about anyone in this neighborhood!”
He then jumped into his beater of a truck and tore ass down the street. He hit every single trash can on the side of the street, then went tearing off around the corner. I immediately called 911, because that was unhinged, and someone driving like that could hurt someone. Like, there are kids in that neighborhood.
So I went in and back to work. like half an hour later, I got a police knock on the door. I went out and there was a female officer standing there. She explained they needed help identifying someone. On my side of the street, I had neighbors on each side of my house, but to the west, just past my neighbors, was an open lot. I followed the officer to the lot where I saw the dude across the street’s truck, and a police car. Beside the car was another cop and a tall dude who was just another citizen.
He had also seen the guy tearing ass around the neighborhood in his truck, and was also there to identify him. Sure enough, it was the neighbor from across the street in the back of the police car. I identified him, and got to talking with the cops for a minute.
My neighbor from across the way turns out to have had a record. Like the department was familiar with him, partly because he was a member of the sovereign citizen movement. His license was suspended because of too many DUIs and outstanding tickets. So, they got him for destruction of property, driving without a license, speeding, reckless endangerment, etc. He was driving so recklessly that the tire tore off the rim of one of the tires on his truck, He kept going, his truck bounding up and down, leaving gouges in the asphalt that you could see if you drove out along the same route he followed.
So he went to jail. For about 3 months. Then he got released and was back across the street giving me the stink eye every time he saw me for the next month or so. Then he seems to have moved and I never saw him again.
Months after that, I was talking with someone in the neighborhood association (not an HOA, more like a civic group dedicated to improving the neighborhood) and she and I traded notes about the guy. Turns out there were rumors in the neighborhood that at least one woman had disappeared and people suspected him of it. Which, cool. Coolcoolcool. Glad I didn’t know that before he took a hike. Because I was already kind of jumpy from the way he was acting, but if I’d known that I’d have had a hard time sleeping.
One last thing here, in high school one of the coaches was a former commander for the Oklahoma State Highway Patrol. His wife was the high school secretary, and talked him into retiring from the OHCP to become a teacher instead. He was explaining once that there were parts of Oklahoma, like the northwest and panhandle, where the highway patrol pretty much tried not to go. This was my first exposure to sovereign citizens. If you’re familiar with Elohim City, then kind of that part of the state.
Anyway. Sovereign citizens. Fun stuff. (Not really. Not at all.)
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Thanks. I missed it because he talks so fast my British ears can’t keep up with his accent.
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That arrest displayed a level of government efficiency that could almost turn a libertarian’s into a socialist. Just drop the tomahawk missile nonsense.
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I agree, but in this case, given the specifics, it sounds like he arrested her for failing to produce a driving license when observed operating a motor vehicle. He probably had also looked up the vehicle license and seen that she’d had her license suspended/revoked. If she had produced an ID to confirm that she was who she is, he could have arrested her for driving without a license.
So I don’t think the arrest was because she was being an asshole to him, but rather because she was endangering other people by driving without a license.
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