Jan. Six Rioters Are Using Sovereign Citizen Defenses To Try to Get Out of Prison

The filings, full of pseudo-legal arguments, strange punctuation, and (in Rubenacker’s case) what appears to be blood, bear the hallmarks of sovereign citizen ideology. And increasingly, sovereign citizen legal tactics have found their way into cases related to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. “The sovereign citizen ideology is essentially that ‘You don’t have power over me, you don’t have control of me. One defendant, Josiah Kenyon, does not appear to have cited sovereign citizen ideas in his criminal case, but invoked them during his arrest. But despite their guilty pleas, the latter two defendants appear to have taken new heart in sovereign citizen legal theories.