This is a really good article. Some of the stories are just...wow, hilarious and tragic:
D. Loren Washburn, a former tax prosecutor in Utah, recalls a woman who was subpoenaed to testify in an investigation of her father for tax evasion. (Sovereigns have a lot of overlap with tax defiers, so tax prosecutors are familiar with the ideology.) She declined to answer questions, he says.
"We said, 'Are you in any way related to him?' " recalls Washburn, now a shareholder at Clyde Snow & Sessions in Salt Lake City and a member of the ABA Section of Taxation's Civil and Criminal Tax Penalties Subcommittee. "She said, 'They say he's my father, but there's never been a paternity test.' "
The woman was prosecuted for obstruction of justice, but when she got to court, she refused to admit she was the person named in the indictment. The judge jailed her for contempt of court, believing, Washburn says, that an afternoon in jail would convince her to comply. Instead, it took about three months.
"The judge was eager to let her out, but at the same time wasn't eager to encourage or indulge in any way this crazy fiction of 'I'm not that person because you spelled my name with [capital] letters,' " says Washburn. "And as a result, she stayed in jail for months and months, and she was the mother of five kids. … The calls from her father said, 'Don't let them bully you; you'd rather die in jail a martyr to the United States of America than give in to this tyranny.' Then you'd hear a phone call from her husband saying, 'Your father's an idiot.' "
I mean, sov'runs are nuts, but this is a whole new level of crazy - 3 months in jail for contempt, with 5 kids?
