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Notes -
The trial of Darrell Brooks is set to start this coming Monday, October 3. Brooks is accused of running over 77 people at the Waukesha Christmas Parade.
Brooks will be representing himself. His motion to do so was granted today. There have been a few entertaining / exasperating videos of Brooks and the Judge going back and forth on this matter.
Brooks believes himself to be a sovereign citizen. In one of the videos he's crossed out the words "I understand" and replaced them with "I have been informed of." These were on a form he had to sign that warned him of the perils of self-representation. It turns out this is a sovereign citizen thing. They believe that to say "I understand" means that they "stand under" the court and are subject to its authority. In the video granting his motion the judge finds that "I have been informed of" is functionally equivalent to "I understand" and Brooks objects, saying he never said those words.
Culture war angle: this was a big culture war story last year as people perceived the attack as both under-covered and when it was covered, downplayed. The Rittenhouse case got many orders of magnitude more coverage and had an order of magnitude fewer victims.
Additionally, on the videos I discovered that YouTube tacks on a link to the sovereign citizen movement page on Wikipedia, giving it the same treatment as COVID-19 misinformation.
The sovereign citizen movement has always given me weird vibes. It feels like a parody of my libertarian side crossed with the flat earth ability to just disregard the obvious evidence that the world doesn't work the way they want it to. Are there mirror world web boards populated by flat earthers with videos of sovereign citizens one weird tricking themselves out of legal disputes?
I like it. It's like chaos engineering / fuzz testing our legal system. Laws and the system that enforces them should be robust to adversarial attack, and by doing their best to gunk up legal proceedings SovCit shenanigans force these systems to stay honest.
The cost of this is that many people are injured, and one likely imprisoned, possibly because their misunderstanding of the law has led them to underestimate the consequences of violating it. To the extent that this is a contributing factor to the original harm, it would overcome the systemic health benefits. But I don't think "because I think I'll get away with it" is typically part of the decision making process while planning to drive into a parade.
I don't think this is true at all, the people who are adversarially attacking the legal system are usually ... lawyers, it's their job, many mediocre arguments are made that judges have to understand and discard, and maybe some of the lawyers are committing sophisticated fraud, collusion, etc. Meanwhile, sovcits come in and talk like schizophrenics. Maybe the first sovereign citizen forced the system to stay honest in some way, like, make sure they have the proper procedure for handling nonsensical babble, but the next ten thousand aren't proving anything. If you're testing a program for vulnerabilities, sure, just feeding it random strings a few times (or more, computers are fast) to see if it crashes is useful! But when it does and you've fixed that, feeding it more random strings isn't going to catch anything. You need more subtle guided fuzzing or actually reading the code, understanding the mechanics and low level details, or prodding specific features for vulnerabilities in the course of use. Which sounds a lot like being a lawyer and not at all like sovcits.
The kind of attack I'm thinking of is, SovCit arguments are meaningfully distinct from nonsensical babble and incompetent/adversarial lawyers.
Nonsensical babble: you show up in court, get found incompetent, assigned a lawyer and removed from the courtroom or otherwise made to shut up. Easy to handle.
The differences between sovcits and very bad lawyers are less clear. Maybe you could treat them as an extreme case. I think Brooks is more likely than even the worst lawyer to invoke the fifth amendment when asked procedural questions, to refuse to follow judge instructions, and to "understand" anything. If Brooks has literally thousands of bad arguments to make, what will the judge do? If he starts repeating them, is someone keeping track? Brooks is representing himself pro se, he can't be disbarred.
The sane, boring, probably correct answer is to force him to accept the public defender after a few days of frustration. But they need a process for that, which is only in place because these people have made it necessary.
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Yeah, if anything, the legal system is being extra nice to SovCits. They could easily be destroyed instantly for not filing the right form in the right way, get rekt. It is kind of a DoS based on the ability of the system to give people slack.
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