William Gilroy #fundie

William Gilroy #fundie rawstory.com

A man who considers himself a “sovereign citizen” tried unsuccessfully to have the judge overseeing a criminal case against him arrested, West Hawaii Today reports.

William Gilroy was arrested in January after taking part in a protest against driver’s licenses, the paper reports. The protest was dubbed the “Freedom Ride,” after the famous protest during the Civil Rights era when black activists rode buses to protest segregation in the Jim Crow south.

Gilroy refused to show proof of insurance, even though he said he has insurance, because doing so would constitute an “invasion of privacy.”

He told the paper he considers himself an organization,“William Michael Gilroy, American private citizen and international organization.” According to Hawaii Today, that is a common belief among sovereign citizens, a strange subculture whose adherents believe they are above the law because they do not recognize it.

Gilroy directed the bailiff in the court room to arrest the judge, Michael Udovic, but Udovic responded by telling Gilroy he was running the risk of being held in contempt and being arrested himself.

“Mr. Gilroy, I don’t want to throw you into jail,” Udovic said, according to Hawaii Today.

31 comments

old comment by checkmate

@Admiral Nopants

You know what? Give these idiots exactly what they want. Recognize them as non-citizens...

... and then round them up and deport them.

While deportation would be an ultima ratio, it would be an interesting legal or mental exercise to actually fully define and spell out what it would mean for these people if they were taken seriously. The consequences would be very far reaching. They want to have their cake and eat it too, but reality would come down very hard on them. I think they'd be very surprised.

“Sovereign citizen” is a contradition in itself.

When it does come down to deporting them, they could be taken to the nearest coast and, pointing out towards the water, told to leave. Now.

old comment by

@ Admiral Nopants

If you send them to another country not only are sending someone to a place they have no legal claim to citizenship with no precedence, procedure, or logic behind where they are sent you are smuggling a known felon in illegally and making your problem the problem of every innocent they come across as well as provoking a diplomatic nightmare out of both spite for the criminal and disrespect for the laws and ruling bodies their destination.

EXACTLY like the soveriegn citizen just showed. Do you completely lack self awareness?

A totally deserted, resourceless island or offshore platform that is an area that is not officially claimed but patrolled with deadly force and extreme prejudice by other nations to prevent border incursions on the other hand... well it's a nice, wide open prison they can call their own as they eat each other.

Middle of the ocean on a rotten plank of wood's good too.

old comment by

There are multiple permanently inhabited research stations in Antarctia but that's beside the point. Deportation in the proper sense requires a destination and boils the issue down to making the offender somebody else's problem even in uncharted territory particularly as you have no guarantees the offender will actually stay put without enforcement. Even if you picked nits on the language and caled it exile you need to realize it is only enforcable in the country that issues the sentence leaving the sentenced free to wander unchecked into other lands without warning, deportation only works politically as it is assumed in a legal sense people would be welcomed in the land of their birth where they have family history. Otherwise it is dropping a hostile agent in their lands.

Throwing their carcasses in the middle of the ocean over international waters might technically absolve a government of intending to introduce a dangerous criminal to whatever beach they washed up on but that's just littering. I can't throw a banana peel over my shoulder not caring where it lands and shrug when it lands in somebody's yard.

Even giving them their own stretch of no man's land to kill each other in and considering any attempt to leave an invasion still presents its own issues where actual sovereignity matters but if it is a privately owned landmass and not actually part of a known nation it technically gives them exactly what they want but does so in a way that will go as badly as possible for them because without the legal protection of a government if they do anything to piss anybody off military retaliation will be perfectly legal without a diplomatic incident unless somebody tries to stake a political claim to the land.

There are complexities you didn't consider and boiled it down to the simplest form of the concept portrayed in the most dismissive and derrogatory manner possible.

I said it wasn't that simple, made a comparison meant to tease more than offend though now that I have had to explain it in as much depth as I just did I am forced to make it again more harshly, and finally half-joked about sending them someplace even worse to get around all that mess. Equating your lack of self-awareness with somebody who thinks problems they cause are for other people to deal with was a bit harsh to be considered friendly but evidently warranted.

old comment by

@ Admiral Nopants

When you responded to Dyz (I had not yet read their post but now that I have you mentioned deportation more than once) you demanded to know why deportation was not an option telling them to "use the stuffing between their ears" and went on a tangent about letting Sovereign Citizens run amok in grocery stores. While you engaged in other absurdities you gave no indication you weren't serious about deportaton. You got the answer twice over why even the most absurd extremes posed difficulty. Why complain that I didn't write you off as a joke entirely?

Very well I shall do that now. Your delivery is grating and your punchlines indecipherable.

For the record the most realistic outcome of these Sovereign Citizens becoming men without countries is for the country they are in to treat them as enemy aliens, put them up before a military tribunal, and either execute them or imprison them indefinitely as prisoners of the state. Even if their actual crimes would not warrant a life sentence under normal circumstances as an alien that cannot be legally deported without an embassy to negotiate their release or in the truly vile cases an unlawful enemy combatant they would spend the rest of their lives in the custody of the government under regs meant for war criminals.