The death of Korryn Gaines and injury to her 5-year-old son in a standoff with police this week was tragic and most likely the result of mental illness.
What led to the fatal incident—with Gaines brandishing a shotgun instead of complying with an arrest warrant—was a traffic stop in March. Gaines was pulled over for not having vehicle tags. According to a police recording of the stop, in place of vehicle tags on her car, Gaines had signage that implied she was a “sovereign citizen.”
A cardboard sign in the back of her car read, “Any Government official who compromises this pursuit to happiness and right to travel will be held criminally responsible and fined, as this is a natural right or freedom.”
So what is a “sovereign citizen” and why is it relevant to the Gaines tragedy?Sovereign citizens are people that have effectively renounced their U.S. citizenship and often believe they are immune from U.S. law.The FBI considers sovereign citizens to be part of a domestic terror movement that has an estimated 300,000 adherents.
Some try to disentangle themselves from federal rule by filing a pseudo-legal document with a court or clerk’s office. To remove any evidence of consent to federal rule, some sovereign citizens throw out their Social Security cards and driver’s licenses, and do not register their vehicles or pay income tax
As a result, sovereign citizens get in trouble with the law often, and because they’re resisters, their problems with law enforcement typically escalate with each interaction. While some sovereign citizens have committed heinous crimes (such as the Holocaust Museum shooting in Washington in 2009), most fight their battles against the government with court filings. To contest a traffic ticket, for example, a sovereign citizen may bombard a poor clerk with hundreds of pages of legal nonsense and misinterpretations of case law.
You can see the language of the sovereign citizen in the way Gaines talks to the police in the video. The cops are not impounding her car they are “stealing” it. She is not getting arrested she is being “kidnapped.” She claims the police have no authority to pull her over and thus throws her court summons out the window.
This Gaines video mirrors hundreds of other “sovereign citizen” traffic stops on YouTube, where unregistered drivers question the legal authority of federal law and argue with the cops. They usually end in a messy arrest.
Sovereign citizenry is most often associated with far-right white militias or anti-federalists like the Bundy family. The concept originated with the Posse Comitatus movement, a 1960s white supremacist organization that believed the county was the highest form of government and encouraged its followers not to pay taxes. They also stated that if the county sheriff did not obey the will of the people, he should be immediately taken to the town intersection and hanged.
The idea seems to have spread to the black community in recent decades, with groups like the Moorish Nation adhering to the movement. Gavin Long, the man who killed three police officers in Baton Rouge, La., last month, had declared himself a sovereign citizen a year before his crime.
