Last edited by The_Shooman (2013-02-13 05:12:58)

I´ve now read Shooey´s contract and letter and its likely to give a lawyer a wet dream, as they will be able to mess around with the clauses and charge the client extortionate fees whilst they keep this going through the courts ad infinitum until the money runs out.

Last edited by The_Shooman (2013-02-14 07:44:31)

Last edited by The_Shooman (2013-02-14 04:51:22)

Dear Shooman,

I noticed that a few people have posted here in semi-support of your actions. I'm not sure if they're genuinely encouraging you, or whether they're posting in jest.

I suspect that you're not going to agree with what I'm going to say, and that you're going to continue on regardless.

However, I feel that I've got to point out that the road that you're travelling down is the wrong road. The "legal advice" that you are following is incorrect. Not only is it incorrect, but it could get you into considerable trouble.

A bit of background: The last twenty or thirty years has seen an increase in what is typically referred to as the "sovereign citizen" or "freeman on the land" movement. This movement is a loose one, but members have a common belief that they are not bound to the government, nor by the laws of the land, but that they are able to divorce their "legal" body and instead operate as a "flesh and blood" body. They often like to rename their flesh-and-blood being so that, instead of being "Shooman", they insist that they are now known as "Man: of the family Shoo".

Unfortunately, the tenets that the members follow are legally incorrect. If you live in a country, you cannot unilaterally abrogate yourself from following the laws of that country. You may disagree with those laws, strenuously in some cases, and you may consider it unjust that you must follow those laws, but nonetheless you cannot simply say that those laws do not apply to you.

Trying to say that the laws do not apply to you because you have written various letters to the government doesn't work, either. Just because you write to someone in government, demanding that they write back to you within fourteen days to prove that they have particular power, and they don't reply to you within your arbitrary timeframe, doesn't mean that you have shown that they have no legal power.

When a police officer pulls you over and asks to see your license and you start telling him that you are not bound by the same laws as other people and citing various (irrelevant) authorities in an attempt to back up your arguments, the officer may be baffled or uncertain. However, that doesn't mean that your arguments are correct. You may get off once. You may get off twice. But it is inevitable that you will not get away with it forever.

Some "sovereign citizens" have small, initial successes because the police, courts or government simply can't be bothered with expending the effort that it takes to deal with certain such people - replying to the baffling, nonsensical arguments, wading through reams of paper, trying to explain to you that their court is not a maritime jurisdiction and so on. As such, you may get away with things for a while simply because it is too much trouble to bother with you. However, if (for example) you end up in default on your mortgage because you decided to stop making repayments because you believe that you do not owe the bank any money (and there are quite a lot of freemen-on-the-land who follow that line of argument), it will not help you to argue before the court that you do not have to pay back the loan. You will lose your house.

A lot of sovereign citizens/freemen like to talk about "common law". Australia is a common law jurisdiction - that means that so-called "judge made" law, or legal practice shaped by earlier court decisions - applies in Australia. However, common law is affected by statutory law, which are laws passed by parliament. Statute law trumps common law - statute law is considered first, in cases where there is a specific statute, but in cases where statute law is unclear, or where it permits the exercise of discretion, then a body of common law will develop to fill in the gaps, so to speak.

I can emphatically say that various other points that you've made are absolutely incorrect - you don't have an automatic birthright to a large sum of money based on your birth certificate and judges don't get hundreds of thousands of dollars when they sentence someone. Furthermore, a lot of the stuff that you've mentioned involves the US and not Australia and so any US authorities or laws that might have been mentioned are largely irrelevant. Finally, the US is not a corporation. The US govt (and lots of govt depts and agencies) does have a corporate identity, but that is for accounting purposes so that it can do business with private companies. It does not mean that the US government is a private corporation.

I shan't bother dealing with other arguments, but in closing, I'd just ask you to think about this point:

The state has power to pass laws. The state has to the power (in certain circumstances, defined by law) to confiscate property, to gaol people, and to punish people in other ways. States have, in the past, used legal force to kill or to imprison people who disagreed with the state.

Do you seriously believe that, instead of engaging in armed rebellion, people who disagree with the power of the state can just undermine that power by writing a few letters to say "You have fourteen days to show me your authority and if you don't, I'm not under your power any more" and to write a few more convoluted phrases on a piece of paper and have it stamped??

Life doesn't work that way, and neither does the legal system. There are no magic phrases that can remove you from the authority of the state and, even if such phrases did exist, parliament would then pass laws to remove the ability to do such things - and remember that statute law trumps common law.

If you carry on down this road, you may end up losing your property (if you have some) and you may even end up being gaoled. It may well take time but you will end up meeting a policeman, magistrate or judge who will not be baffled by freeman-on-the-land phrasing and who will simply assert the state's authority regardless of your arguments. 

In the course of my work, I've spoken with quite a few sovereign citizens/freeman on the land people, and they are all firmly convinced that their beliefs are correct - even when they lose court cases and end up being fined or otherwise penalised when their arguments fail. I don't really expect what I've written above to change your mind, as other people haven't changed their minds even when their arguments have utterly failed. What I do hope, however, is that my comments will cause you to read more widely, to have a look at websites that give you the other side of the picture, and to have a think about things before you end up jeopardising your situation.

Last edited by The_Shooman (2013-02-15 01:04:37)