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SUNDAY FOCUS: THE FRINGE The Sovereign Among Us Comment By Thomas Moriarty Mail Tribune MailTribune.com By Thomas Moriarty Mail Tribune Posted Feb. 8, 2015 at 2:00 AM By Thomas Moriarty Mail Tribune Posted Feb. 8, 2015 at 2:00 AM Speaking the language --> While the theories embraced by sovereign citizens are too numerous to list, federal law enforcement authorities say there is some language that tends to be common throughout their legal filings.... » Read more X Speaking the language While the theories embraced by sovereign citizens are too numerous to list, federal law enforcement authorities say there is some language that tends to be common throughout their legal filings. Emphasis on proper capitalization — Sovereign citizens believe that the all-capital spelling of someone's name refers to a fictional corporate entity created by the government at the person's birth, often asserting that theory in an attempt to shirk debts incurred via documents with all-capital spelling. Many will also use colons or semi-colons to separate their last name from their first and middle names, i.e. John Doe Smith would be written as John Doe; Smith. "Su juris" — Latin for "of one's own laws." Often written after the plaintiff's name in sovereign citizen legal filings. References to the Uniform Commercial Code — The Uniform Commercial Code, a federal code that regulates commerce, is a critical component of the "redemption" process, a sovereign citizen concept that seeks to reclaim funds from a secret government bank account supposedly created for each person at birth. "Strawman" — A term for the secret U.S. Treasury account that sovereign citizens believe is created under the all-capital spelling of every American citizen's name. A LONG HISTORY While Earl Harris' shooting was the first known violent confrontation in Southern Oregon between a sovereign citizen and law enforcement, there have several other civil and criminal cases in the region involving sovereign citizens. One of the earliest organized groups in the movement, the Citizens' Bar Association, was founded in Medford in the 1970s by Art Hollowell. Hollowell, who federal authorities say also ran a tax-evasion scheme called the Northwest Community Exchange, was indicted in 1990 on federal tax evasion charges and spent six years on the run, at least part of that time in Montana with members of the Freemen militia group. Special agents from the Internal Revenue Service arrested him in 1996 after he was spotted in White City; Hollowell was later sentenced to a year in prison after pleading guilty to interfering with internal revenue laws and contempt of court. In 1998, Ronald Griesacker, a fugitive militia member from Kansas who had formed a "people's court" with other common-law activists, was arrested by Shady Cove police while he was hiding out on an old mill property near Trail. Griesacker was wanted by federal authorities for passing two fraudulent checks. When FBI agents following up on a tip showed Griesacker's picture to Shady Cove police, officers said they recognized him from recent appearances in the city's municipal court, where he'd been protesting a friend's traffic citations. Griesacker was later convicted of conspiracy, bank fraud and mail fraud charges and sentenced to more than four years in prison. In 2011, a federal grand jury in Eugene indicted Coos Bay residents Ronald and Dorothea Joling for trying to conceal more than $300,000 in taxable income. In nearly identical affidavits filed with the court, the couple claimed that state and federal courts had lost all constitutional authority under the National Emergency Banking Act of 1933. Both were convicted at trial in October 2014 of conspiracy to defraud the United States; Ronald Joling was also convicted of tax evasion and filing a false tax return. Their sentencing is scheduled for April 1. THE STORY BEHIND THIS STORY This story originated with a public records request to Oregon State Police for its investigative reports from the police-involved shooting of Earl Harris on June 10, 2014, in Ashland. The Mail Tribune received all of the reports produced by sworn personnel assigned to the Jackson County Major Assault and Death Investigation Unit's investigation of the shooting, with the exception of one report from a trooper assigned to the OSP Arson and Explosives Unit in Central Point. State police withheld the bomb technician's report on the explosive devices found in Harris' home, citing a state law that exempts records referring to specific operational plans for law enforcement equipment. After seeing a note in one detective's report that investigators found documents proclaiming Harris' "sovereign citizenship" in his home, Mail Tribune reporter Thomas Moriarty spent a month going through roughly 1,000 pages of court filings from Harris' multiple state and federal court cases, as well as several hundred pages of federal law enforcement documents and literature from within the movement. He conducted numerous interviews and obtained reports by the Medford Police Department detective assigned to the shooting investigation. » Social News By most accounts, June 10, 2014, started out as a pretty normal morning for the Jackson County sheriff’s Civil Division. Deputies gathering for an 8:45 a.m. briefing were told they’d be serving an eviction at 35 Mistletoe Road, Ashland. Resident Earl Cranston Harris, 73, was a recently widowed veteran of the U.S. Navy who’d been fighting the foreclosure of his home for almost four years — a familiar and sympathetic story in post-recession America. When deputies arrived at Harris' house, they found the gate to his driveway locked. A variety of “no trespassing” signs adorned the fence, some of them warning law enforcement to stay away. One in particular stood out: "This is private property on 'state' of the union land. This is not a resident (sic) of domicile." Deputies knew Harris to be confrontational and that he liked guns. Harris also had flown an upside-down American flag on his property as a sign of distress. What they apparently didn't know was that he was an adherent of the so-called "sovereign citizen" movement, a loosely knit cohort of tax activists, survivalists and the down-on-their-luck who rely on arcane interpretations of common law concepts to challenge what they view as government tyranny. When sovereign citizens' barrage of legal filings fail to dissuade law enforcement and the judiciary, authorities say, the resulting confrontations can be deadly. In a 2014 study funded by the Department of Homeland Security, law enforcement officers rated sovereign citizens their greatest perceived terrorist threat, ahead of Islamic militant groups, organized militias and white supremacists. Since sovereign citizen lecturer Jerry Kane and his 16-year-old son, Joseph, gunned down two Arkansas police officers during a 2009 traffic stop, before being killed themselves in a massive gun battle, federal authorities have grown increasingly alarmed by a movement that rarely recognizes their legal authority. Their fears over the ideology's spread are so great that, according to one federal report, agencies have been feeding the homemade documents presented to them by sovereign citizens into gang databases in order to track their activities nationwide. A one-man war Deputies later told Oregon State Police detectives that Harris had been described to them as a "constitutionalist" and someone who wasn't a fan of government. If anything, that was an understatement. Since U.S. Bank initiated foreclosure proceedings on his home in 2011, Harris had been waging a protracted one-man war against what he viewed as a conspiracy to steal his home. He claimed the bank had illegally converted his home loan into a promissory note and that the court had no legal standing to hear the case. In several affidavits filed in Jackson County Circuit Court, Harris claimed his corporate identity — his name spelled in all capital letters — had relieved his "flesh and blood" person of any obligations to make payments on the loan. According to a U.S. Bank estimate for attorney's fees, he filed more than 118 self-written documents with the court. Judge Ron Grensky ultimately ruled in favor of U.S. Bank. In June 2012, Harris — again representing himself — filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Medford, accusing Grensky, U.S. Bank and its attorneys of a "sham legal process" and "RICO fraud,” in a complaint Magistrate Judge Mark D. Clarke would later describe as “incomprehensible.” "To expose the banksters' fraud with their practice of keeping a 'blank assignment,' " Harris wrote, "they must prove that they are a real party of interest by (the judge) demanding that they produce and show (the judge) the original promissory note." U.S. Bank had, in fact, produced the original promissory note and trust deed for the property during the original foreclosure case. In another affidavit submitted to the court, rife with misspellings and grammatical errors, Harris complained of Grensky's treatment of him in the courtroom. "I feel that you are in violation of your position, oath of office and in direct conflict of why you are there. I feel that you are have committed war with our Constitution and that you have place yourself outside of the immunity of being sanctioned and/or prosecuted." Judge Owen Panner ultimately dismissed the suit with prejudice, but Harris filed an almost identical complaint just weeks later, with Panner and Clarke now also named as defendants. "Harris names Judge Clarke and myself solely because we dismissed Harris' prior complaint," Panner wrote in an order terminating the second case. 'Like shattered glass' Federal law enforcement agencies say the sovereign citizen concept dates back to the 1970s, when similar views were popularized by a radical anti-tax group called the Posse Comitatus. Taking its name from a legal concept that allows law enforcement officers to enlist the service of any citizen, the group believed that the U.S. Constitution recognized no higher authority than that of the county sheriff and believed it could convene common-law courts to try government officials. The organization crumbled following several deadly gun battles with police and a wave of arrests in the early 1980s, but Ryan Lenz of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups, said the movement spawned several beliefs that have found their way into present-day sovereign citizen ideology. "The entire sovereign citizen ideology is derivative of a pantheon of anti-government beliefs," he said. "The ideology looks like shattered glass." At the heart of the present-day movement is the concept that the all-capital spelling of someone's name on a legal document refers to a fictional corporate entity, rather than a living human being. Adherents believe that legal documents spelling their names in all-capital letters — which includes birth certificates and driver's licenses — are thus illegitimate, as are any attempt to enforce their requirements. Throughout his court filings, Harris himself was careful to always spell his name using proper capitalization, always trying to distinguish himself from the "EARL C. HARRIS" who signed the promissory note for his home loan. An extension of this theory is what's known as redemption, based on the belief that the federal government creates a secret bank account under the name of each person's fictional identity when they're born, which many sovereigns believe they can borrow against. "It's sort of this pipe dream in the sovereign citizen movement that you can cash in on it," Lenz said. In state and federal courtrooms throughout the country, sovereign citizens have become known for burying their opponents in mountains of paperwork that has little or no legal weight, a tactic many authorities refer to as "paper terrorism." According to a formerly restricted FBI intelligence guide, many of their documents have a real legal basis but are being used under fraudulent pretenses. Others, such as "affidavits of truth," have no legitimate basis and are typically used to make threatening proclamations to prosecutors and state officials. Desperate measures in desperate times Lenz said the sovereign citizen movement largely disappeared from the public eye until about 2010, after the Arkansas shootings had drawn the attention of law enforcement nationwide. Lenz said he thinks the resurgence coincides with the financial crisis of 2007 and resulting wave of home foreclosures. "They sell it to people who are really suffering," he said. Jerry Kane had spent the years prior to the Arkansas shooting traveling around the country giving lectures on how to fight foreclosure using sovereign citizen theories. It's not clear when Earl Harris dove into sovereign citizen philosophy, but his first use of its language in court filings appears to coincide with the death of his wife. Earl and Glory Alene Harris had married in 1999; as part of the marriage, he came into joint ownership of the home at 35 Mistletoe Road, which Glory had purchased in 1985. Glory Harris died in 2009 at the age of 76. A year later, Harris filed a preemptive suit against U.S. Bank, which was trying to collect on a $55,000 home loan the couple had taken out in 2006. In court documents, Harris said he'd been reading about foreclosure law on the Internet. While his initial filings appear to have been written mostly by himself, by the time of the 2011 foreclosure case, Harris was relying almost entirely on premade forms taken from sovereign citizen websites, their language increasingly aggressive. Ashland police Deputy Chief Tighe O'Meara describes sovereign citizens such as Harris as something of an anomaly in the famously liberal community. "We do have some contact with them here, I wouldn't say a lot," O'Meara said. "I think the political atmosphere in Ashland is less conducive to them than the more conservative, libertarian parts of Jackson County." O'Meara said he had more contact with sovereign citizens at his prior law enforcement job in Michigan, where he describes the ideology as being "rampant." Central Point newsletter 'leading publication' Federal authorities, however, say a little-known newsletter run out of Jackson County has been near the hub of the movement for several decades. The American's Bulletin, published out of Central Point by Robert Kelly, is described in one report by a federal criminal intelligence center as a "leading publication promoting sovereign citizen tactics, popular within prisons." Kelly said he's been involved in what he called the "freedom" movement for 41 years, and that he took over as publisher of the paper and changed its name in 1982. He declined to comment on the previous iteration of the paper, except to say that it was also concerned with "educating citizens as to their rights." According to Mail Tribune archives, the newsletter was previously run under the name of the Citizen's Sovereign Bulletin by Medford businessman Art Hollowell, who was later convicted on federal charges of interfering with internal revenue laws and contempt of court. Kelly said he was unfamiliar with Earl Harris' case, but said it had the hallmarks of what he describes as "the national mortgage fraud." "The police and the sheriff's department are dumb as rocks when it comes to the national mortgage fraud," he said. Kelly argued that the cash in circulation has no monetary value, citing the Uniform Commercial Code and the National Emergency Banking Act of 1933. "If there's no real money in circulation, how could you think you were buying a house anyway?" Kelly said home-buyers' signature on loan documents artificially creates value for the banks where there was none to begin with. "(The banks) waited for an economic situation to occur so they could take it back and sell it again," he said. Kelly said he's too busy to help people with these kinds of legal battles directly, but he does provide information about tax and foreclosure issues to "selected individuals." The Bulletin also markets a line of publications on topics ranging from American common law concepts to guides to the redemption process. Warning signs While it isn't clear whether deputies knew the full extent of Harris' beliefs, there had been warning signs. In 2011, civil deputies had been sent to his home to repossess a recreational vehicle and a golf cart. Harris came out of the house with a gun, but he put it down when deputies ordered him to. Deputies told investigators that later the same year, Harris showed up when the RV was being auctioned off near the sheriff's office and caused a scene. Because of the perceived threat, sheriff's officials decided to send several members of the SWAT team as backup to the June 10 eviction. They hoped Harris would leave the house without incident and the SWAT personnel wouldn't be needed. But after deputies cut the lock on the gate and knocked on his front door, eviction notice in hand, Harris refused to come out, telling them they couldn't be there "because the foreclosure (was) still in litigation." When it became clear Harris wasn't coming out, SWAT members broke down the back door. Harris retreated into the house, prompting deputies at the front door to break the glass and unlock it. Harris greeted them in a hallway with a 12-gauge shotgun. When Harris refused to drop the gun, Deputy David Penkava fired three times, striking Harris twice. Harris slumped against the wall, still holding the shotgun. When Harris still refused to drop the gun, SWAT member Sgt. Jeremy Whipple shot him once. Harris' arms dropped to his sides, the shotgun falling in his lap. He died from two gunshot wounds to the chest. Another bullet had struck his hand. As deputies cut away Harris' clothing to attempt first-aid, they found he had come prepared for a fight. In addition to the shotgun, he had a .25-caliber semi-automatic Browning pistol stuffed in his waistband and a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver hidden in his back brace. Inside one of Harris' numerous gun safes were six homemade explosive devices, all live. A bomb technician disabled them safely. During a search of Harris' bedroom, state police detectives found piles of paperwork proclaiming his sovereign citizenship, along with numerous documents referring to Judge Grensky. On June 26, a Jackson County grand jury ruled Penkava and Whipple were justified in their use of force; then Jackson County Sheriff Mike Winters said the deputies had no other choice. Kelly said it's easy to understand how someone in Harris' position could find themselves forced into confronting law enforcement with deadly force. "The police, county sheriff's office, whoever was involved in the shooting, aided and abetted the national mortgage fraud," he said. "Nobody had to be kicked out of their homes. Nobody had to be shot." Kelly said he could see how the shooting could be viewed as justified, since the deputies were ignorant of the conspiracy. Hidden struggles Because their ideology conflicts with established criminal and civil law, some sovereign citizens have tried to create get-out-of-jail-free cards. FBI intelligence documents say that many have deputized themselves as special law enforcement officers of fictional states and counties, complete with fake badges. Because this opens them up to possible criminal prosecution for impersonating law enforcement, authorities say, it can end up exacerbating their contacts with police, putting both parties in a potentially dangerous situation. In terms of legal battles, Ashland Deputy Chief O'Meara said he thinks the threat to police from sovereign citizens is fairly limited and specific. "I wouldn't say they create many liability concerns for law enforcement because most of their ideas are based in pure fantasy, for lack of a better word," he said. What can be an issue, O'Meara said, is the legal vendettas many sovereign citizens end up pursuing against individual officers. In interviewing Harris' family acquaintances, detectives learned that none of them knew much about his legal troubles. A friend told detectives that he knew only that Harris thought the eviction was unlawful. Harris' estranged son told detectives that he hadn't spoken to his dad in over a month and didn't know about the foreclosure. Speaking to Detective Deanna Harris-Powers by phone that morning, the younger Harris described the situation as surreal. While he knew his father was an "anti-government conspiracy theorist," he said, he never imagined that Harris would be involved in something like this. It's difficult to say how many people subscribe to the sovereign citizen ideology, but Southern Poverty Law Center estimates have put the number at more than 100,000 in the United States alone. Like many of them, Earl Harris apparently learned what he knew from the Internet and mostly kept the details between himself and the court. One line from his hundreds of court filings seems eerily prescient of the events to come: "The Masted federal flag is a warning to all." Reach reporter Thomas Moriarty at 541-776-4471, or by email at [email protected] . Follow him at @ThomasDMoriarty . By Thomas Moriarty Mail Tribune MailTribune.com By Thomas Moriarty Mail Tribune Posted Feb. 8, 2015 at 2:00 AM » Comment or view comments Reader Reaction » STAY INFORMED Email NewsLetter Sign Up Today Sign up for our newsletter and have the top headlines from your community delivered right to your inbox. Southern Oregon Directory Featured Businesses Loading... 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