Tennessee right to battle 'sovereign citizens'

The state’s crackdown on the “sovereign citizens” movement is a welcome development.

A Davidson County grand jury last week indicted 10 East Tennessee adherents of the bizarre movement. They face charges of forgery and filing bogus liens against public officials, a common tactic of the movement.

The indictments came as Lee H. Cromwell, a sovereign citizen adherent, was convicted of vehicular homicide for driving backward into a crowd in Oak Ridge, killing a father of two. Cromwell filed a series of multimillion-dollar liens against the officer who arrested him, the district attorney general prosecuting him and the judge presiding over his case, and other officials.

Authorities arrested Cromwell and nine others for filing false liens. Filing a bogus lien is a felony punishable by up to six years in prison and a fine of up to $3,000.

Sovereign citizens view all levels of government as illegitimate – unless they can manipulate it toward their malicious ends. They base their beliefs on the puzzling notion that the U.S. government secretly shifted its basis from the Constitution to a government based on admiralty law, the law of the sea and international commerce.

One particularly strange notion is that at birth the government creates a separate legal identity for each child. According to an explanation of the movement’s belief system by the Southern Poverty Law Center, sovereign citizens consider themselves — the flesh-and-blood person, not the created identity — exempt from the law.

Many sovereign citizens do not pay taxes and refuse to carry government documents, relying instead on handmade forms of their own devising. When forced to go to court, they file numerous motions written in nonsensical pseudo-legal jargon. The SPLC terms the tactic “paper terrorism.”

The one government function that adherents seem to believe to be legitimate is the system for filing liens. Instead of filing a lien to recover an actual debt, however, sovereign citizens file them to harass officials.

Liens are easy to file – anyone can fill out a form online at the secretary of state’s website. Removing the lien, which can affect credit ratings, is a hassle.

Secretary of State Tre Hargett said the arrests send a clear message.

“Public officials as well as state and local government employees shouldn’t be harassed with fraudulent liens just for doing their jobs,” Hargett said in a statement.

Hargett supports legislation sponsored by state Sen. Brian Kelsey, R-Germantown, and state Rep. William Lamberth, R-Cottontown, that would allow officials to remove fraudulent liens from the filing record. The law would make it easier to expunge the false claim and recover legal costs, but does nothing to prevent them from being filed in the first place.

Sovereign citizens use their strange beliefs to justify their refusal to take on the responsibilities of real citizenship such as paying taxes, fees and fines. Authorities should continue to crack down on this menace to the public.

Knoxville News Sentinel