Why support the “We The People” public-oath sticklers who the state is prosecuting like a criminal enterprise? A few reasons: Solidarity. Because as hardheaded as they might be, defendants Stephen Nalty and Steve Byfield are still JUDICIAL REFORM ACTIVISTS. Sense of fair play. Half the courtroom gallery is filled with Colorado Attorney General staffers and FBI special agents chumming it up with jurors and briefing their THREE FBI UNDERCOVER WITNESSES while the defendant pariah side of the audience is warned by the judge that even a whisper will result in ejection. Thrills. Where else are you going to see this many federal agents pushing their weight around, barking at you in the hallways, swaggering gleefully about how much smarter they are than the defendants? Pathos. Come watch the Assistant Fucking Colorado Attorney General, Robert Shapiro himself, lead a team of prosecutors against the unrepresented defendants, watch Shapiro belittle them, lecture them, trivialize their difficulties defending themselves in jail, and pretend they can review “tens of thousands” of pages of evidence and “hours and hours” of undercover surveillance tapes in a single day. Because you can make a difference. Come push the FBI-guys’ buttons. Come witness and document the abuses of the overbearing prosecution team. Come lend public pressure on the judge, whose conscience is already bothering him about how unfair this sham trial has become.
Liens
You don’t have to agree with how Nalty and Byfield went about trying to reform the judicial system, but aren’t they mostly right? Judges ARE corrupt. Local officials ARE NOT accountable to the people. Law enforcement WON’T pursue charges of their own corruption and the media certainly won’t side with the reformers. When Nalty, Byfield and Co, served commercial liens valued at billions and trillions of dollar against officials who hadn’t filed oaths of office, it was an effort of last resort to get someone’s attention. No one was thinking, hey, maybe this eleven-figure dollar demand will slip through the cracks and the billions will be ours!
Each lien was calculated to represent the sum defrauded from and owed to the American People. Prosecutors can tap these defendants for conspiring and racketeering and extorting and attempting to influence public officials, but they can’t say the defendants aimed to obscond with one single penny. Throwing three undercover infiltrators at a twenty member judicial reform group, putting thousands of manpower hours into locking these defendants away, is gross abuse of authority and it’s hubris.
Authentic transgressions
As the sham trial goes on, the pieces are coming together on the cases of Nalty and crew. It turns out federal investigators labeled them “sovereigns” because they’ve held themselves not responsible for paying traffic tickets, property taxes, and the like. In the end I’ll grant you Nalty’s group may be guilty of those. I say “may” because such citations may have been retaliatory for their political beliefs.
As to the punishment, I believe adjudicators should take into account that the defendants acted not to enrich themselves, nor to flaunt the law per se, but to assert political rights about which they may have been misguided. Again I say may because the defendants are being tried, after all, according to a set of laws, which enforce a social contract, the terms of which the parties do not agree.
I use the word misguided as a nod to those who think the Nalty gang have acted like idiots. That’s easy to say, and easy to laugh, but no one’s yet figured out how to emancipate labor from the yoke of capital. You may regard interest and rent as your inherent debts. These sovereigns don’t and they’re trying to say so.
Economic slavery
Ours is a system of peonage to which this crew feels they never indentured themselves. The ersatz writs and liens they spammed to every official they encountered were the legal loopholes they thought could break the bank and liberate everyone from financial tyranny. While Nalty’s scheme intended insurrection, it wasn’t against democracy or the republic, it was against taxation without representation, the same beast Americans pretend to have overthrown with the Declaration of Independance.
Instead of tea into Boston Harbor, this crew dumped a bunch of junk paper unto the reception counters of Colorado public offices. Charge Nalty’s crew with littering maybe, at most, vandalism, though it’s hard to say these vandals caused even a scratch. Every public official who testified as a victim said they didn’t take the ersatz documents seriously.
The writs and liens looked officious, but weren’t attributed to known government or banking institutions. Likewise signatures were signed in red. Red was chosen to represent the signer’s blood, even though red is a color which automated banking systems reject as unreadable, therefore invalid.
Not one witness expressed confusion about the validity of the papers. They mentioned too the rambling diatribes in the text block.
To call the defendants “paper terrorists” wildly overstates the effect they achieved. They didn’t terrorize anyone. Governments like to accuse rebellious insurgents of “terrorism”, but that’s another paralegal threshold with which most common citizens, and certainly these “sovereigns”, disagree.
Real funny money
These guys did the equivalent of feed Monopoly Money into ATMs. No bank balances were changed and no real money came out. Counterfeit currency is one thing, but denominations of your own handywork pretending to be only that does not qualify as funny money in the illegal sense. I’m guessing forms submitted in a language foreign to bank clerks would be rejected out of hand. How are these any different? Irregular submissions, as one witness called them, need not generate calls to the FBI or the Colorado Joint Terrorism Task Force. I’ll bet that ATMs know to reject Monopoly Money. If they don’t, whose problem is that?
The trial of defendants Stephen Nalty and Steve Byfield is due to wrap up Friday. The prosecution will have taken seven days to present its case and Assistant Attorney General Robert Shapiro intends to object if the defense rebuttal takes more than a half day, maybe a whole. This trial is meant to intimidate the other defendants to convince them to take pleas.
Next in the pipeline is Bruce Doucette whose trial starts October 16. Defendants Harlan Smith and Dave Coffelt have hearings on October 18. If they do not take deals, Shapiro intends to enjoin their cases, to save time and money. He’s already convinced defendant Brian Baylog to take a deal and turn state’s evidence. Baylog is scheduled to testify against Nalty and Byfield shortly.
By now the condemnation of Nalty’s commercial lien scheme will have cost Colorado millions in man hours and legal expenses. You can fine a graffiti artist for having to restore an edifice to its original lustre, but you can’t expect him to bear the full cost if you chose a cleanup crew that wears Gucci loafers, most of whose jobs is to pat the other on the back.
Colorado’s overkill with federal agents and counter-terrorism experts is a problem of its own making.
The Nalty-Byfield trial continues through this week 8:30am – 5pm, at Denver’s Lindsey Flanigan Courthouse, in Division 2H, ironically, “Juvenile Court”.
A Pennsylvania 14-year-old is facing two years in juvenile detention for mounting a statue of a Christian mortal-diety and simulating receiving oral sex. The teen is charged with defacing public property, if merely symbolically. Critics assert authorities are punishing an act of blasphemy, not vandalism, which is probably correct, but I see a teaching moment here beyond a so-called religious offense. I ask: was the teen GAY? I would have chosen to urinate on the prophet-creature if I was going to desecrate it but since this teen invoked an unsolicited blowjob, I’d be more comfortable if I could infer that both participants were homosexual. Involuntary or not, the pose of two males of equal weight suggests they are probably engaged in something consentual. As a scene of heterosexual sex however, I think the posture smacks of male-dominant rape-culture, and doesn’t win any points for humor. For me, the longer this macho emulator can be detained from opportunities to clasp real heads into forced acts with his groin, the better. Especially with his predeliction for casual sidewalk encounters, however long he may have had his eyes on this particular object of his lust. The aspiring blasphemer rapist can be thankful he wasn’t African American or he’d be tried as an adult.
COLO. SPRINGS– Poor Kyle. Not only is the newly suspected-arsonist in a hospital burn unit with third degree burns, but his until-recent colleagues are now laughing at his clumsiness and are belittling his motives. “What did his vandalism accomplish?” –his advice-givers ask, as if sensing a teaching-moment for their Youtube viewers. Well, if Kyle Lawrence INTENDED to burn down a civic justice building, as his cohort alleges, he accomplished THAT. You can’t take that away from him, you polemically-challenged pedants!
GARDEN OF THE GODS, COLORADO SPRINGS– Mountain bike X-tremists and thrillcraft eco-vandals Jason Memmelaar and Chris Heath weren’t apprehended by the El Paso County Sheriff or the CSPD, but interrupted by off-duty park ranger Stephanie Stover, who saw them cutting tree limbs to expand an illegal downhill run. When she scattered the limbs across the trail to ameliorate erosion, she later found a note which warned:

The estimates of the property damage being done to the primarily refugee population of Gaza (75% of the 1.4 million enslaved in Israel’s Gaza ghetto for the Palestinians) are now running into the Billions of Dollars, and this is an area that has an annual per capita income of less than $500/ year. The Israeli Vandals continued to destroy by dropping White Phosphorus bombs on the United Nations Headquarters there, blowing up the UN buildings and thousands of pounds of food supplies for those refugees.
Has any other country ever become so linked to vandalism as Israel? The national state bug is even the Caterpillar in the world’s eyes. For a group of people that talk about building a nation of milk and honey out of supposed wasteland (which of course is what they continue to call the land full of Palestinians that they moved into), they sure do a lot of tearing down. 