I didn’t see any assaulting going on in the video before the tasering. It didn’t look as though anything had been cut out of the video either. Nothing in the video seemed to suggest that he was violent, or would need to be violently wrestled to the ground if they simply grabbed him, pulled his arms behind his back, and applied handcuffs, then escorted him out of the building or some other appropriate response.
If he had physically resisted such an attempt, then I’d be more inclined to agree that the tasering might have been justified, but as it was, he didn’t seem as though he was in danger of injuring anyone, nor did he seem like he would physically resist being grabbed by the arms and carried out. If he did - if they attempted to firmly grasp him and he pushed away and struggled, at that point I would probably agree that tazing him is better than engaging in a physical fight. But they for some reason felt it was necessary to zap him before trying to apprehend him or even telling him that they were arresting him.
I researched the gold-fringed flag thing once and what I came up with was that once upon a time some scrupulous person in the Navy had questioned whether the flags to be purchased for the JAG (or whatever the equivalent at the time was) should be adorned with a fringe or not, and the question was passed along to the Chief of Naval Operations or some such muckety-muck, who issued an official finding that a flag with a gold fringe was perfectly appropriate for use in a naval court. Some kook found this statement and interpreted it to be an official government declaration that a gold-fringed flag was ONLY appropriate in a naval court, and from there made the grand leap to the conclusion that if ANY court has a gold-fringed flag, it is automatically a court of maritime law.
The thing about these “magic word” defenses is that they’re not completely nuts. There ARE magic words that can have a huge effect on a case. You’d be amazed at how many people with drugs in their car will give their consent to the car being searched. They think, the cop’s just going to search the car anyway, so there’s nothing to be gained by arguing; it’ll just piss him off. When they later learn in prison that “I do not consent” would in fact have magically stopped the cop from searching (assuming there was no probable cause) and even would have resulted in the evidence being thrown out of court (again, under certain circumstances the person may or may not fully grasp), and that “I will not answer your questions without a lawyer present” might have had a similarly magical effect in getting them off the hook, one can imagine the depths to which such knowledge must strike at their soul.
To most of us, those things are just mundane knowledge everyone has and probably will never need, but for those who played hooky during civics class and are too stoned or stupid to completely follow the plot of a Law & Order episode, this is deep magic. I suspect many of them can’t accept that they landed in trouble because of simple ignorance and that it’s now too late to do anything about it. They become convinced that there is more going on here, that the whole system must be rigged so that those with the right knowledge can escape punishment and achieve success. (And of course, society IS rigged so that those with the right knowledge can be successful; these people simply have no idea how to evaluate what the “right knowledge” is.)
Did you watch all four parts? In the second (I think) he was inside the courtroom. The bailiffs came over and told him several times to stop taping. Then they tell him he’ll have to leave the courtroom, and he refuses to do that either. I didn’t see how they got him out, but then part 3 starts with the “I’m a man, not a person” stuff.
In short, his belligerence with the bailiffs started before that final confrontation that ended with the tasing.
Under the Canadian rules posted above, that wouldn’t make any difference. The issue would only be whether he was posing an immediate risk of causing bodily harm at he time he was tazed. As I read those rules, a likely way for the situation to play out would be to first inform the guy that he’s under arrest and instruct him to put his hands behind his back. If he doesn’t comply, then you tell him that you are going to take his hands and place them behind his back for him and cuff him, and then you do so. If he begins to react violently, you back away and draw the tazer and warn him that if he does not back away he will be tazed. You then inform him again that you will place his hands behind his back for him, and do so while a tazer is aimed at him. If he begins to react violently again, you back away and he’s tazed. Obviously there is some additional risk that a suspect might suddenly turn violent before the arresting cops can react. I think that’s pretty minimal, given the training police have, but that’s why US regulations at least as they are implemented in practice, seem to favor tazing a clearly non-coperative suspect first, before making any attempt to subdue them physically and without giving them any particular warning.
That may all be true, but I thought it was of some value to point out that his uncooperative attitude with the bailiffs started before part 3 of the video. Considering how part 2 ended, it’s hard to imagine how they got him out of the courtroom without some physical force, but seemed to stop short of arresting him. We’re also seeing the tape as edited and presented by the person who was tased, so we’re not seeing the parts he doesn’t wish us to see.
On a practical note, what happens if you tase a person while someone else is touching him? I can imagine that the electrical current could travel, to some degree, from one to another. If that’s the case, it seems like it would be difficult to physically attempt to restrain someone, and if that fails, to disengage and escalate to using the taser. There were two bailiffs there, that we could see. What happens if one of them is still wrestling with him while the other uses the taser?
If you look at the unedited video, you can see that he left willingly when they start telling everyone else to leave. He says he wants witnesses.
In re tazers, I’m no expert, but I’d be very surprised based on what I know if there was any effect whatsoever on someone who wasn’t in contact with both of the two prongs.
This is how I view the situation, and why I think most of these “magic word” legal defense theories have just enough of a bit of truth to the lay man to seem real.
I think that most of the references in this thread about the flag fringe thing have avoided the point. Way back when I was a tax protester, the whole point wasn’t that it was ‘an admiralty court’ exclusively. It was that 1. It *could *operate under ‘admiralty laws’ which could disregard Constitutional rights, and 2. the fringe on the flag was a clear and obvious sign that it could operate under admiralty laws, and the whole point of any flag, anywhere, is to let everybody know what they were getting into, so to speak, and that if you didn’t protest/challenge the jurisdiction immediately, you waived all right to challenge the fact that you were given the bum’s rush into the electric chair/Sing Sing, because you had blamed well agreed to less than Constitutional rules.
Allegedly, there was case law which backed that up.
If I mis-read any of the above posts, I apologize; as it is, I didn’t interpret any of them to show that this was the issue in re: the borders of the flag. I think the judgement cited above was dodging the issue by saying that the Defendant was making the claim of exclusivity, or else the def. was totally unclear even of his *own *point.
BTW, did you all catch the “…it’s not like I haven’t been tazered before.” Priceless.
No, this isn’t really a good summation of what the nuts believe. It’s not a person vs. citizen thing, and it’s not rooted in Constitutional law.
The idea behind the soverign citizen thing is that a human being and the legal entity recognized by the state are two different things. A “Freeman on the land” born James Martin believes that his individual physical and metaphysical being - his body and soul - is a completely different thing from the legal existence of “James Martin.” Everything the state has that describes you - your birthcertificate, driver’s license, etc. - is not describing YOU. It’s describing a completely separate thing, a legal personage known as “James Martin.” To a freeman on the land, their legally recognized identity is like a corporation; it’s not THEM. And whenever the government tries to administer the law, they claim the government has no authority over their real, physical person, it only has authority over the imaginary thing described as “James Martin” in legal documents. Their body and soul have no connection to that legal personage.
I realize this is a little mind-bending - it’s way, way weirder than the difference between a person and a citizen - but it’s crazy, so it’s supposed to be hard to understand.
This is what a Freeman nut means when he talks about “joinder.” They aren’t using the term in its correct sense; they have adopted the word to mean “the formal admission that my body and soul is in fact the same thing as the legal personage which just happens to have my name attached to it.” They believe that by asserting “I accept no joinder” or “I am not making joinder” that’s it’s a legal incantation that keeps their actual physical body legally separate from the government’s documentation of their identity.
That’s why so many of these people cling to weird rules about their names; they will say, for instance, “I am James Martin. My birth certificate, however, is in capital letters and says JAMES MARTIN. Therefore, the legal personage described on that birth certificate is not me, because James Martin and JAMES MARTIN are different.” Or some will actually change the way they style their name, so they’ll call themselves “James of the Martin Family” or “James-Martin.”
A fellow used to call me and drop in at my office occasionally, all upset about some sort of spousal property dispute involving the difference between upper case names and mixed case names. Asking him to stop calling and to stop visiting didn’t have much effect, so when he did stop I was curious as to both the upper and mixed case nonsense and as to why he disappeared off the map. Some time later, a collegue was telling me about a fellow who was locked up for trying to hire someone to kill my collegue. It was the same fellow, which solved the disappearance question but did not solve the text case question. Thanks, RickJay. That’s one little mystery solved.