Local couple Michael and Shawndale Chilcoat of Mercer County are facing criminal charges for allegedly breaking into the capitol building and breaching the Senate chamber during the January 6, 2021 attacks in Washington, D.C. The Chilcoats are now both asking the judge in their case if they can represent themselves in the proceedings. They are trying to use what experts call a Sovereign Citizen defense as their legal strategy. WYSO reached out to the Chilcoats and did not get a response by publication.
To learn more about this strategy, Reporter Chris Welter spoke with Seattle-based attorney and Sovereign Citizen Movement expert Caesar Kalinowski IV about what the movement is, its connection to conspiratorial thinking, and why it probably won’t work.
Transcript (edited lightly for length and clarity)
Caesar Kalinowski: The sovereign citizen movement is sort of a pseudo-legal movement that claims that the federal government in general can't force you to be part of its jurisdiction unless you consent to that jurisdiction. The notion is that you are born as a sovereign and you didn't consent to be a part of the United States, that you were born as a person under natural law, therefore, you can reject the notion of the authority of the federal government over you.
The problem is that the idea comes from a misreading of the 14th Amendment and from a lot of pre-Civil War legal cases.
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