Lawrence Michael Jiron, an activist in the extreme anti-government "sovereign citizen" movement, was convicted on October 30 in Alamosa, Colorado, on four counts of filing false liens. The jury could not render a verdict on four other false lien charges.

Jiron, who headed a loosely organized group of sovereign citizen activists in the San Luis Valley in southwestern Colorado, filed bogus liens in October 2000 against four police officers, two judges, a sheriff, and a former district attorney in retaliation for being arrested by Alamosa police officers. During the trial, Jiron, who defended himself, admitted to filing the $30 million liens, but claimed that he had a right to file them.

District Attorney Peter Comar argued that Jiron was taking the law into his own hands in order to retaliate against public officials at whom Jiron was angry. In one document Jiron mailed to Colorado Attorney General Ken Salazar, Jiron wrote, "I would think about all of this. This is financial ruin for all of you. I will stop all of this if you drop the charges and release me at once."

Photo Credit: Erin Smith, Pueblo Chieftain

For the past two decades, bogus liens have been the most common "paper terrorism" tactic used by sovereign citizens to attack law enforcement officers, public officials and private citizens. To explain the sovereign citizen movement and its tactics, the prosecution brought Dr. Mark Pitcavage, ADL Director of Fact Finding, to the stand as an expert witness.

Pitcavage described the movement as a loosely organized, extremely anti-government movement that "has come to believe the government as we know it is essentially illegitimate. The true government was slowly replaced by a conspiracy…They claim allegiance to that early government, the government they believed was taken over."

Sovereign citizens file bogus liens, Pitcavage explained, because "the liens will cloud the title to that property so that if that person tries to sell his or her house, he or she can't."

Jiron faces up to six years in prison on each conviction. He will be sentenced in December.

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