Several men associated with a Black sovereign citizen group who led an hours-long standoff with Massachusetts State Police over the holiday weekend fought weapons charges in court on Tuesday.
Seven of the 11 men were arraigned, all pleading not guilty to charges related to improperly stored firearms after the standoff on the I-95. Many identified themselves as linked to Rise of the Moors, a Black sovereign citizen group, on social media.
Malden District Court Judge Emily Karstetter heard the same argument from many of the men: that they are not U.S. citizens subject to state or federal law, and that they demand to be freed.
One defendant, who refused to disclose his name to authorities, said in court that the process is unjust.
“What you’re doing right now is wrong, it’s wrong,” he said. “This is my life you’re playing with here. This is my life. I respect the Constitution.”
The Rise of the Moors is part of a broader Moorish Sovereigns movement that is largely Black. Its members believe that they are exempt from U.S. law under the 1786 Moroccan-American Treaty of Friendship, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks the group.
Rachel Goldwasser, who studies sovereign citizen and anti-government groups at the Alabama law center, said that the court’s proceedings are in line with what will happen when members of different sovereign citizens movement groups are taken to court.
“What they believe is that they are not citizens of the United States of America as we know it,” Goldwasser said. “[Rise of the Moors] believe that they have their own territory, which is essentially what we would consider Rhode Island, and that they are the inhabitants of that territory. So they, in their minds, do not think that they need to comply either with law enforcement, or with the court or any other public officials.”
The Moors’ numbers are unknown, but the Southern Poverty Law Center has tracked its online presence and found that its YouTube channel has 17,000 subscribers, up from 5,000 last year.
“You can imagine that's a pretty steep increase in how many people are seeing their rhetoric and potentially, you know, believing it and deciding to participate in their activities — or to copycat their behavior,” Goldwasser said.
Southern Povery Law Center does not have evidence that the Rise of the Moors is a violent group.
“They have not been, to our knowledge, violent in the past, but they are extremely supportive of possessing and carrying firearms and that has been longstanding,” Goldwasser said, adding that they could be potentially provoked to violence. But the fact that the group did not respond violently during the extended standoff with police in Massachusetts Saturday is a good sign, Goldwasser said. "They won't necessarily be violent during any confrontation if they weren't in this one,”
Legal defenses that rely on claiming laws or constitutional principles don’t apply to particular groups have been “uniformly rejected” by the courts over the last several decades, GBH’s legal analyst Daniel Medwed said on Morning Edition Tuesday.
“The gist of the claim is maybe there's a treaty or some other exemption that applies to a particular group,” Medwed said. “That's a very strained and selective interpretation of the law, and it basically rejects what's called the supremacy clause — Article Six, Clause Two of our Constitution — which says that federal law is supreme. So I think, without necessarily going into the weeds too much, that it probably doesn't have much merit.”
Some defendants declined legal representation, and all are being held pending a dangerousness hearing on Friday.
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