Sovereign Citizen Movement

2011-07-31 "Anti- government activist takes on foreclosures" by Michael Braga
[http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20110730/ARTICLE/307309995]
On paper, Jacob-Franz Dyck is one of the largest property owners in Florida. More than 600 deeds have been filed in the name of trusts he controls in 17 counties, including eight in Sarasota and Manatee.
But Dyck never paid a penny for those properties.
A self-proclaimed "sovereign citizen" who believes that U.S. laws don't apply to him, the 72-year-old Dyck filed some deeds with the purported goal of helping people facing foreclosure remain in their homes. Others were to help evicted owners reclaim their property.
Feeding into a more radical version of the anti-tax, anti-big government, anti-Obama passions that have stirred everything from the Tea Party to the Birthers in recent years, Dyck's ideology has resonated among those hit hardest by the Great Recession.
"Jacob is a very serious person who never asks a cent for his services and lives in enormous austerity," said Tomas Diaz, a Cuban-American pastor who has been working with Dyck for the past year to recover a north Miami church he lost to foreclosure in 2006. "He just wants to tell the world what the banks have done to us."
Like so many who played the real estate game during the boom, Diaz racked up enormous debts he could not repay. And like hundreds of other people across Florida whom Dyck is supposedly helping, the notion that their loss was somehow illegitimate under the sovereign-citizen creed seems like a godsend.
But Dyck -- a man stripped of his dental license in 1988 and imprisoned for six years for grand theft a decade later -- has alarmed law enforcement officials.
They say he and members of his anti-government group are committing "paper terrorism" by clogging courts with an avalanche of almost unintelligible lawsuits and "wild deeds" that purport to protect property by placing it into "pure trusts" defended by "land patents."
There is nothing illegal about the suits and deeds, lawyers and real estate experts say, but at least two title agencies have already sent out statewide warnings about Dyck's activities. Dyck himself acknowledges that he has been visited by an FBI agent, who warned him to stop attempting to mass-produce his activities.
"They know what I'm doing is legal," said Dyck, who responded to a letter sent by the Herald-Tribune to his Miami post office box. "But they said if I continue acting on a large scale, they will come after me."
For some who have followed Dyck's advice, the biggest problem is not his anarchist philosophy or his penchant for court filings, but that his theories and actions do not work. In fact, they often end up making life more difficult for those he is supposedly aiding.
"He's created a lot of havoc for a lot of people," said Robert Syversen, a resident of upstate New York who solicited Dyck to help save his South Glen Falls home from foreclosure and ended up in trouble for filing a lawsuit accusing a federal judge of fraud.
"He gets you into this stuff and then isn't around when you need him."
Born on his grandfather's farm in Ukraine in 1939, Dyck says he was caught behind enemy lines at the outbreak of World War II.
He was not able to escape Eastern Europe and get back to his father's homestead in Kansas until he turned 10.
By the 1980s, court records show Dyck operating a dental practice in Memphis, Tenn. In 1985, the state Department of Insurance cited him for running an illegal dental plan, then shut him down in 1988 and stripped him of his dental license.
A year later, Dyck filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection. It was then that his career as a committed anti-government activist took flight.
From 1993 to 1999, Dyck filed at least five lawsuits against a collection of governmental entities in Tennessee, including the Madison County government, the City of Jackson and the Monroe County Sheriff's Office.
Dyck said he was angry at what he viewed as overreaching government officials who had no right to interfere with the lives of free citizens. He demanded to be paid $75 million in damages -- a tactic that has become common among disgruntled sovereign citizens.
"There are three types of people who get involved in the sovereign-citizen movement," said Mark Pitcavage, director of fact finding for the Anti-Defamation League in Columbus, Ohio, and creator of the Militia Watchdog Archive. "There are those in financial distress. There are con artists. And there are those that have a fundamental inability to deal with modern bureaucracy and are always trying to fight City Hall and are losing again and again.
"What the sovereign-citizen movement offers these people is a way to deploy retaliatory tools against officials they don't like," Pitcavage said.
Dyck's lawsuits against Tennessee officials were ultimately dismissed, but they confirmed his reputation as a rabble-rouser.
That did him no good when he was accused of grand theft in 1998.
At the time, Dyck was living with Madisonville, Tenn., residents James and Agnes Hagemeyer, professing to be a holistic healer, according to Hagemeyer's two sons.
Agnes Hagemeyer was suffering from cancer and Dyck said he could make her better, according to two brothers, David and Gale Hagemeyer.
Dyck also bonded with their father by appealing to his anti-tax and anti-big-government biases.
"Dad never wanted to give Uncle Sam anything," Gale Hagemeyer said. "That enabled Dyck to slide right in. He'd listen to Dad talk about how the government was going bankrupt and everything was going to hell and he fed right into that."
After Agnes Hagemeyer died, Dyck dug up $25,000 in gold and silver their father had buried under the cement floor in the basement and took off in their father's 1987 Lincoln Continental, the Hagemeyer brothers say.
With help from a local lawyer, James Hagemeyer, who died in 2009, was able to get Dyck arrested and ultimately sentenced in 1998 to six years in prison.
"He wins people's trust and plays on their weaknesses," David Hagemeyer said. "In the end, my father didn't get to retire."
Dyck tells a different story.
He says Agnes Hagemeyer did not want her husband to inherit the gold and silver and begged him to take it and give it to her nieces and nephews.
Angered by his imprisonment, Dyck retaliated from behind bars by filing a lawsuit against James Hagemeyer and the sheriff who arrested him.
But like all his other suits both before and since, Dyck ended with nothing but a dismissal.
The real estate boom and foreclosure crisis offered Dyck new opportunities and breathed life into his litigious nature.
After his release from prison in 2003, Dyck moved to Branson, Mo., and then to an RV park near Brooksville, from which he filed foreclosure defense suits on behalf of clients across five states.
All these suits have similar characteristics.
They begin by invoking the name of the Messiah and refer to quotations from both the Old and New Testaments before launching into a litany of arcane laws that supposedly prohibit the government and banks from foreclosing on homes.
In one section, the suits claim banks cannot bring foreclosure actions in state courts that fly an American flag with yellow and gold fringes. In another they say banks have no independent right to foreclose because they are merely loan servicers and are owed no money. In other sections, the suits claim properties are protected by "pure trusts" and "land patents" that can never be broken.
"With pure trusts you don't have to pay taxes and the government can't tell you what to do with your property," said Dyck, who charges clients $2,500 to set up such trusts.
To judges and law enforcement officials, Dyck's suits are nothing but incoherent mumbo-jumbo.
"Despite its length (62 pages), the complaint contains few factual allegations, instead consisting primarily of statements of law and case citations," U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle wrote in response to a suit filed by Dyck in Hernando County. "At one point, plaintiffs allude to efforts by an unspecified health department to 'harass the property without provocation or reason,' but they do not identify what the allegedly harassing conduct consisted of or connect any of the defendants to the alleged harassment."
To Dyck, the repeated failure of his lawsuits has nothing do to with their content. It is simply a sign that the court system has become a slave to banks and corrupt politicians.
"They are part of the fraud," Dyck said.
What state attorneys and judges do not understand is that there is no higher authority than the One Supreme Court established by sovereign citizens themselves, he maintains. Any decisions or rulings made by lesser state or federal courts do not need to be followed.
When Dyck made that argument in Hernando in 2009, he wound up in jail.
Court records show he had come to the defense of Kim Clayton Perry, a Bible-spouting, tax-averse Vietnam veteran who had been fighting for six years with Hernando officials and neighbors about the installation of a sewage treatment system and the expansion of his 27-unit RV park.
The park, Mary's Fish Camp, is where Dyck came to live.
Dyck convinced Perry to put the land in a pure trust protected by a land patent, saying that if he did, the government would not be able to tell him what to do.
But when Dyck declined to produce that land patent and provide an explanation for the content of his suit, he was sentenced to jail for contempt of court. He sat there for nearly four months until he finally gave in to the county's demands.
"I told him that sovereign-citizen theory is all well and good, but they've got the guns, they've got the jail, and you're in it," said David Rodriguez, a Chicago attorney hired to represent Dyck.
"In the grand scheme of things, you have to play by their rules so you can come back and fight another day."
Today Mary's Fish Camp, which sits along a quiet bend in the Mud River, is virtually empty. The only mobile home there is Perry's. The U.S. government is preparing to foreclose because of $150,000 in unpaid taxes.
"It's almost tragic," said Joseph Mason, a Brooksville attorney who was trying to negotiate a settlement for Perry with government officials when Dyck entered the picture.
"Kim had a good business. He had customers that came back year after year after year. Now he could lose everything."
Perry did not respond to a message left by the Herald-Tribune under the door of his mobile home. But Syversen, the New York resident who was likewise captivated by Dyck's ideas, said Perry is now equally disillusioned.
Found by a Herald-Tribune reporter researching Perry's case in the Hernando County Courthouse, Syversen said that both he and Perry have lost contact with Dyck and are trying to find him.
But Dyck said the real reason for his separation from Perry is that Perry spent too much money.
"He's got to get out of debt first," Dyck said. "But in the end we will win all this."
Now living in Hialeah, Dyck is busy trying to help Pastor Diaz get his Baptist church back. Once again, he is relying on pure trusts and land patents to overcome the fact that Diaz's lender won two foreclosure judgments totaling $2.5 million in May 2006, seized the 6,000-square-foot church in August of that year and sold it to a new owner four months later.
Dyck's confidence stems from his belief that the lender stole the property in the first place.
"Let's assume someone steals your nice four-wheel drive vehicle and sells it," Dyck said. "Then you go to the Dolphin Mall and see your car with the same scratch on the door and the same VIN number. You call the police and get your car back. The same thing should happen if someone steals your house like banks do.
"I don't care how many times they sell it. That house still belongs to you."
Randall Norlund, a Miami attorney now trying defend Diaz against a slander of title suit filed by the lender, says Dyck's theories have only hurt his client.
"There are several things that led Tomas to do what he shouldn't have done," Norlund said. "By issuing and recording that wild deed he was desperately trying to challenge what happened in 2006. On top of that, he felt these bankers were the last people on Earth that deserved to get title.
"Then Jacob comes along and says he knew how to get the church back by waving a wand or something, and because of some sort of religious association, Tomas believes him. It's like hocus-pocus."
Never having won a case is not stopping Dyck from continuing to try.
Comparing himself to the Founding Fathers, Dyck said that if it were not for people like him, Americans never would have freed themselves from Great Britain and will never free themselves from banks and corrupt politicians.
"It's like the song about the dam and the ram," Dyck said, "I'm like the ram who was determined to put a hole in the dam.
"Without someone like me, nothing is going to get done."

Jacob-Franz Dyck
Sovereign Citizen of the united States of America,
of the State of Florida [a Republic].
Practitioner of the Common Law
enshrined in the Constitution's Bill of Rights

"Sovereign citizen Jacob-Franz Dyck explains his beliefs in 2010 deposition"
[http://insiderealestate.heraldtribune.com/2011/08/01/sovereign-citizen-jacob-franz-dyck-explains-beliefs-in-2010-deposition]
Sovereign citizen Jacob-Franz Dyck provided the following testimony about his beliefs to Hernando County’s attorney Jon Jouben after being convicted for contempt of court in Hernando County in late 2009:
Q:How do you become a sovereign citizen?
A: Well, In 1868, they passed a sovereignty act where you can change from being a sovereign to being statutory and then back. You go through the different steps. I went through different steps. I’ve been through advertising. Then I did a declaration through the common law court.
Q: This sovereignty act you referred to … You said ‘they’ passed. Who is ‘they’”?
A: This was passed by the United States government, federal government, expatriation. You can expatriate out of the U.S., into the United States of America and back to the U.S. that quick.
Q: And you said you went through this process?
A: Yes.
Q: When did you begin?
A: That was probably in ‘95, ‘96 when I did that.
Q: How did you initiate that process?
A: Advertising. I went through the common law courts, and that said. ‘This is what you need to do if you’re going to be part of this system.’
Q: Advertising where?
A: Newapapers.
Q: As a legal ad?
A: Legal ad under the legal ad section.
Q: You refer to the common law court. What court is that?
A: Well, the people have their own courts, we the people. We’re sovereign, and we have our own courts. Sometimes we have them in our homes. Sometimes we have them in a courtroom. Sometimes wherever we choose.
Q: Where was this court which you applied in 1995?
A: It was in Kingfisher, Oklahoma.
Q: When was this process completed?
A: It usually takes about four times 30 days to do the advertising, probably another 30 days to get on the docket and go do what your declaration says you’re going to do.

Q: In your opinion, what is a sovereign citizen?
A: A sovereign citizen is one that’s where they’re declared sovereign by King George in the Treaty of 1783, in the second clause I believe it is, first or second clause. It’s stated that the people of the United States of America won their sovereignty and did not get it by grant from King George, and we’re sovereign. There’s nothing between us and God.
Q: What are, in your opinion, the \[legal\] implications of being a sovereign citizen?
A: Well, we have our own set of laws which is generally the Bible, and the Bible tells us to do this also. And we have laws that were from England, common law of England before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and we have that plus other laws that we have that have been passed.
The constitution is under common law. The Declaration of Independence in under the confederation of common law. The Bill of Rights are all common law, and we form a court according to Article IX of the common law — I mean the Bill of Rights.
Q: What effect does becoming a sovereign citizen in your opinion have on compliance with state and federal statutory law?
A: We supersede state and federal statutory lawa. The last time that was ruled on by the Supreme Court was in 2001, a case by the name of Great Northern Railroad versus Bull Tail and Red Feather. And I can’t remember the date on that one or the number on that.
They stated that the common law is the supreme law of this land, and they have no authority to overrule that as it states in the Ninth Article of the Bill of Rights and the Seventh Amendment.


"Sovereign citizen Jacob-Franz Dyck explains how “pure trusts” help people facing foreclosure"
[http://insiderealestate.heraldtribune.com/2011/08/02/sovereign-citizen-jacob-franz-dyck-explains-how-pure-trusts-help-people-facing-foreclosure/]
While in Hernando County jail for contempt of court in January 2010, sovereign citizen Jacob-Franz Dyck explained to Hernando County’s attorney Jon Jouben how he tries to help people facing foreclosure by putting their real estate into “pure trusts” that are protected by “land patents.”
Specifically in 2006, he came to Florida to help Kim Clayton Perry, the owner of Mary’s Fish Camp, a 27-unit RV Park in Hernando County.
Since 2001, Perry had been fighting with Hernando County for the right to expand his RV park onto adjacent land. But the county stopped him because he did not have adequate sewage treatment and no permit. Perry put in a new sewage treatment system but still could not get the permit.
Dyck’s solution to all this was to put Mary’s Fish Camp and an adjacent parcel into a “pure trust” protected by a “land patent,” which would supposedly allow Dyck to do whatever he wanted without having to get government permission.
Hernando County did not buy Dyck’s legal arguments and threw him in jail when he refused to cooperate with court dictates. The following excerpts come from the deposition Dyck provided while in jail:
Q: How would people find you to help them to set up trusts?
A: I don’t know. It’s just word of mouth. I don’t advertise. I don’t go out and do that.
Q: How did you come to know Kim Perry?
A: A Lady — let’s see; I can’t remember her name — out of Kansas City, Missouri called me … She’s the one that introduced me to Kim Perry. She said this gentleman had a lot of problems with the county and the state and he wanted to talk to me. So I flew down here and met them, talked to them. And he had somebody else working on that. I left and went back home.
Q: When was this?
A: I believe this was in the latter part of 2005, first part of 2006.
Q: When did you come to meet Kim Perry again?
A: I met Kim Perry again when he called me and said he wanted me to come down and help him … I think it was 2006 … He explained to me what his situation was, and I told him the only way I knew of doing anything or helping him in any way would be to go into a pure trust organization.
Q: To your understanding, what is a pure trust organization?
A: A pure trust. I don’t do just pure trusts. I do common law irrevocable contracts of pure trusts. A pure trust means that the property is turned over to the trusts. The trustee holds the property. I in turn give him a certificate for the full value of the property with 100 shares.
Q: A hundred shares of what?
A: Just 100 shares that’s the same value as the properties.
Q: I have to be honest. I’m a little confused on that. You give him 100 shares?
A: I said that this is 100 shares of equal value .. in this case being Mary’s Fish Camp.
Q: Did you create a trust for Mary’s Fish Camp?
A: Yes, I did.
Q:What is your understanding of what Mr. Perry’s title to the property was?
A: My understanding was that Mary’s will stated that he was to be the manager of the property and he was to get ‘x’ number, one third or one half or whatever it was of the property. He could run it and sell the whole amount and divide the difference between himself and his daughter.
Q: I’m going to show you a document … Do you recognize this document?
A: Yes. This is the document that was filed with the court, the warranty deed.
Q: Is that the warranty deed for you to the lower property which you proffered.
A: Correct. He was the grantor of the property, and I was the trustee for the trust. I might add there was another deed for all of this in the record.
Q: Do you recognize this document.
A: Yes. This was a document that I told you I did this that this was temporary, and he was to combine this by having it resurveyed and then having a surveyor make one legal land description out of it. he never did that until what, a year ago, something like that. Yeah. This was done 3-24-09, and the other was done on the 23rd of April … of ‘07. The reason he didn’t tell me what the reason was. When I found out, I was livid. That should have been done immediately, in my opinion.
A: Do you recognize this document?
Q: Yes. This is the trust that we created.
A: Is this the declaration of to the Mary’s Fish Camp trust.
A: Correct.
Q: Under this trust, who is the trustee?
A: I am.
Q: What powers go with that, and duties?
A: Whatever I want to do. There’s no restriction on it. That’s what makes it a pure trust.
Q: What obligations do you have to the beneficiaries of the trust?
A: To make them money
Q: Who are the beneficiaries of the trust?
A: The beneficiaries of the trust are Kim Perry through the family trust or whatever.
Q: Who has control over Mary’s Fish Camp property? What would be your duties as trustee?
A: That’s my duty as trustee.
Q: What is your understanding of what the zoning is on the respective parcels?
A: Zoning is for Mary’s Fish Camp to be in existence, and in reality both pieces of property were used as campsites and RV sites long before your zoning commission was ever established, so it was grandfathered in.
Q: Is that for both parcels.
A: Both parcels correct.
Q: Are you aware that the court has ruled that the upper parcel is not zoned for recreational vehicle use?
A: Well, I don’t want to get into any hassles about upper, lower part or what have you. But once that becomes Mary’s Fish Camp under a pure trust organization, contracts or irrevocable pure trust organization, the city, state county or nobody else has any say on that.
Q: Are you aware that Mr. Perry was jailed for contempt for putting RVs on the parcel?
A: I understand that.
Q: It’s my understanding that you deny the authority of the Board of County Commissioners to control zoning of that parcel now that it’s included in the pure trust … You’re specifically saying the Hernando County Commission no longer has zoning authority over the parcel?
A: Correct.
Q: The court did put Mr. Perry in jail, so what is the jurisdiction of the court in this case.
A: The jurisdiction of the court is that they have no jurisdiction over the property. This property is not only that, but the property’s also in a land patent.
Q: Do you recognize this document?
A: That is a land patent from the Bureau of Land Management. It’s a contract between the Bureau of Land Management and myself for the trust and the trustee. And this itself puts it out of the realm of the state. You go through the federal government after that is issued.
Q: Are you aware of when that document was signed and by whom?
A: You mean when I got it?
Q: No. When it was originally produced.
A: Yes, I do. It was rejected. If you read through it carefully, you have the whole thing. It was rejected by the state of Florida. It has a rejection on it. Are you aware of that?
Q: That’s the document I was provided by your attorney.
A: No. I mean are you aware of the fact that it was rejected? It doesn’t shoe it all the way through here, but it was rejected by the government.
Q: Which government?
A: I don’t remember the year or anything. It’s written on here. You have to see the original document at the Bureau of Land Management in Springfield, Maryland.
Q: What, in your opinion is the effect of that document?
A: That is a lodial title which has absolutely no restrictions from anybody other than Washington, D.C.
Q: First of all, just for clarification, what is a lodial title?
A: It’s a title that stands alone, and there’s only one of them.
Q: And how does this document relate to Mary’s Fish Camp?
A: This is Mary’s Fish Camp. The document was given to us by the Bureau of Land Management that Mary’s Fish Camp site sits on is this particular document.
Q: How does it relate to Mary’s Fish Camp Trust?
A: I’m the one who went to get it, to get that position for the property to protect it. It was my duty to do it, and I do that on each and every trust document I can.
Q: You’ll just have to bear with me a second.
A: Okay.
Q: This document which I have a copy of, if you look is signed … Is that, to your knowledge President Franklin Pierce?
A: Correct.
Q: Do you know when he was in office?
A: I don’t recall exactly. Probably in the ‘70s, 1870s, in that period.
Q: Would it surprise you to learn that he was in office from 1853 to 1857?
A: Could be. Like I said, I don’t remember when Pierce was.
Q: Just bear with me a second. I’m a little confused as to how the document from 150 years ago vests title to the Mary’s Fish Camp trust. It predates the Mary’s Fish Camp trust by over 150 years.
A: It’s done. That’s the way you get it. You can get — the next person after me can get another title for it, land patent for it under the lodial title if he wants to. But there’s a passage from one to the other, and that is done in our recorder’s offices now sometimes, and sometimes it’s done just two people making the transition.
And you can get your land done the same way if you advertise it nationally and internationally. And there’s no claim to it. And there’s another person by the name of George Emerson that does it out of Michigan, and that’s who did my work. It’s advertised for at least four weeks in a national or international newspaper, and he has one.
Q: If you could estimate, how many trusts have you set up for trustees?
A: Probably 90 to 150, something like that. I don’t know. I don’t keep track of them.
Q: Would it surprise you that you’re listed on 200 documents under the Hillsborough County website?
A: It could be. Like I said, I don’t keep track of them.
Q: How did you come in contact with the people for whom you’re preparing these trusts?
A: Just word of mouth. Like I said, I don’t advertise.
Q: Do they pay you a fee?
A: They do.
Q: How much would that be?
A: That fee is generally $2,500.


"Jacob-Franz Dyck explains the sovereign citizen court system"
[http://insiderealestate.heraldtribune.com/2011/08/03/jacob-franz-dyck-explains-the-sovereign-citizen-court-system/]
While in Hernando County jail in 2010 after being convicted of contempt of court, Jacob-Franz Dyck explained to Hernando County’s lawyer Jon Jouben about how sovereign citizens’ courts are more powerful than any other court in the land.
Jouben started the dialogue by asking Dyck why he tried to remove a case involving Mary’s Fish Camp and its owner, Kim Clayton Perry, to a overeign citizen court and what that meant.
A: I filed a document for removal for change. I filed a document for writ of Benoit after I filed a document challenging jurisdiction and the court’s jurisdiction over the property, and I filed a change of venue at the same time.
Q: What is a writ of Benoit?
A: It’s a writ that takes a case out of a lower court to a higher court.
Q: Who issues such a writ?
A: I wrote it. I’m part of the common law court for the populace, part of the common law court. I wrote that one, and I presented it to the clerk of the court. They signed it. I believe they signed it, and the other documents — your court won’t take the document by itself. Most courts do, but your court won’t/ Florida don’t take it.
So they told us that — I went to the clerk’s office and asked them how we have to do this, and this is what I want filed. And the clerk said, “You first have to file some kind of challenge with the heading of the court.” And then she said, “You put that in, and it will get filed with that.” And we did that, exactly what she said.
Q: To what court were you purporting to remove the case?
A: The common law court of Hernando County.
Q: And what’s the common law court of Hernando County?
A: The people.
Q: Is there a presiding officer?
A: We’re all equal in the court. We’re all sovereigns.
Q: Who are the participants in this court?
A: People that are considered sovereigns, people that think like us, people that believe that the United States of America still exists.
Q: How if I bring a case hypothetically to the common law court, what happens next?
A: Well, the case is first of all read by the clerk which in this case is Kim Perry, and he reads it. And he would file it and know whether it deals with common law or whether it deals with differences that the common law court can hear. And then he sends it back to you, and you stamp it, he sends it back ti you, and he proceeds with it after that.
Q: What procedurally happens next?
A: Whoever filed it gets a copy of it, and then they send it to whoever it is that is the opposing party.
Q: Is that what happened in this case?
A: I believe so.
Q: What was the outcome?
A: What we did was abate it, first of all, an abatement. You can get it ex parte because of the diversity of citizenship. And when you do the ex parte, all of your proceedings are null and void. And that’s what we did, and the court ruled on them and signed off. They ruled that it was null and void, the judgment was null and void. And they made a judgment stating all the proceedings were null and void.
Q: And when you say “me,” who are you referring to?
A: Whoever had jurisdiction.
Q: I’m a lawyer, not a court. So are you talking about the circuit court proceedings?
A: Circuit court proceedings, any court proceedings. When we challenge jurisdiction, when you challenge jurisdiction, the individual that challenged has to answer before anything else goes on and wait some time in between sever weeks if nothing happens, which if nothing happens, then we proceed on with the judgment and the abatement of the judgment.
Q: And did that happen in this case?
A: Correct.
Q: Was the judgment issued?
A: Yes. It was reached. The matter was, number one, abated, and number two, that the judgment was such that you had no authority to come after the property.
Q: Did the common law court, to your knowledge, indict Judge Musleh?
A: To my knowledge, I don’t believe so.
Q: The Board of County Commissioners?
A: I don’t believe so. I don’t know.
Q: Does the common law court have the ability to indict people?
A: Absolutely.
Q: For treason?
A: For treason, for whatever crime there is.
Q: What would be the penalty?
A: Well, you have to understand that in a common law court, it is the people that decide what the penalty is at the time they make the ruling on it. They don’t go by a set that says for treason you get three years or whatever. There’s different degrees of all crimes, and it’s the people that do the judging, and they are the ones that decide. They are the judges of to what extent the treason occurred.