John Jones Bey v. State of Indiana

In the

United States Court of Appeals

For the Seventh Circuit

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No. 16-1589

JOHN JONES BEY,

Plaintiff-Appellant,

v.

STATE OF INDIANA, et al.,

Defendants-Appellees.

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Appeal from the United States District Court for the

Southern District of Indiana, Indianapolis Division.

No. 1:15-cv-01598-TWP-TAB — Tanya Walton Pratt, Judge.

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SUBMITTED OCTOBER 27, 2016 — DECIDED FEBRUARY 3, 2017

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Before POSNER, FLAUM, and RIPPLE, Circuit Judges.

POSNER, Circuit Judge. John Jones Bey, who describes

himself as an “Aboriginal Indigenous Moorish-American,”

filed in the district court what he labeled a “Writ of Manda-

mus,” seeking to enjoin state and county officials from tax-

ing real estate that he owns in Marion County, Indiana. He

also asked that the defendant officials be ordered to refund

the taxes that he’d paid and to compensate him for their al-

2 No. 16-1589

leged wrongs. He asked the district court to award him $11.5

billion. The court refused, and granted the defendants’ mo-

tions to dismiss, precipitating this appeal.

Bey says he’s a “sovereign citizen” and therefore can’t

lawfully be taxed by Indiana or its subdivisions in the ab-

sence of a contract between them and him. (See El v. Ameri-

Credit Financial Services, Inc., 710 F.3d 748, 750 (7th Cir. 2013),

for a description of the beliefs of so-called sovereign citizens

of alleged Moorish origin.) We have repeatedly rejected such

claims. See United States v. Jonassen, 759 F.3d 653, 657 and

note 2 (7th Cir. 2014); United States v. Benabe, 654 F.3d 753,

767 (7th Cir. 2011); United States v. Hilgeford, 7 F.3d 1340, 1342

(7th Cir. 1993); United States v. Schneider, 910 F.2d 1569, 1570

(7th Cir. 1990). We do so in this case as well, and thus affirm

the district court.

But we want to take this opportunity to examine the

rights asserted, in this as in the other cases we’ve cited, by

persons describing themselves as sovereign citizens by vir-

tue of their alleged Moorish origin. Most of them are African

Americans who belong to the Moorish Science Temple of

America (MSTA) and claim to be descendants of the Moors

of northern Africa, though they are not; Moors are of mixed

Berber and Arab descent rather than being African American

in the usual sense of being descended from black Africans.

The original purpose of MSTA, founded in the 1920s by No-

ble Drew Ali, whose followers call themselves “Moors” in

place of more conventional designations such as “Black,”

“African American,” and “colored,” was to claim govern-

ment “recognition and respect as full citizens rather than the

second-class descendants of slaves.” Leah Nelson, ‘Sover-

eigns’ in Black, Intelligence Report, Southern Poverty Law

No. 16-1589 3

Center (Aug. 24, 2011), www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/

intelligence-report/2011/‘sovereigns’-black (visited Feb. 2,

2016, as were the other websites cited in this opinion). MSTA

focuses on “uplifting” its followers, and encourages them to

vote in U.S. elections so that they can escape “political slav-

ery.” Spencer Dew, Moors Know the Law, 31 J. L. & Religion

70, 72–75 (2016).

The MSTA home office, located in Washington D.C., has

issued a statement clarifying that the organization is neither

“a Sovereign Citizen movement [n]or a Tax Protestor

Movement” and that it was not founded “for its members to

become anarchist or conspiracy theorist[s].” Moorish Science

Temple of America, Statement on Radical and Subversive Fringe

Groups (July 15, 2011), http://msta1913.org/Statement_

Radical_Moors.pdf. A MSTA temple in Georgia denounces

sovereign-citizen propaganda as “completely asinine” and

asks that Moors not “adopt[] the ideals of these European

groups who at their core, hate [Moors’] very existence.” Fre-

quently Asked Questions, Question 1, Moorish Science Temple

of America (Georgia), moorishsciencetemple.org/faqs/.

But clearly, sovereign-citizen ideas appeal to many [self-

described] Moors, who combine those ideas with Ali’s teach-

ings in an effort to reclaim and rewrite black history. For ex-

ample, the “Moors Order of the Roundtable” uses eight-

eenth-century treaties with Morocco to distinguish “Free

Moors” from Africans who could be enslaved and teaches

that courts have no jurisdiction over Moors. Nelson, ‘Sover-

eigns’ in Black, supra. Other groups claim that their Moorish

nationality gives them the status in the United States of an

indigenous people, although the logic behind this claim is

deeply obscure. See id. Renita Bey teaches that Europeans

4 No. 16-1589

are latecomers and Moors never granted them citizenship.

Washitaw Nation Comes Under Investigation, Intelligence Re-

port, Southern Poverty Law Center (June 15, 1999), www.

splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/1999/washita

w-nation-comes-under-investigation. She teaches her fol-

lowers that they are “Muurs” from “Muu” who traveled to

North America before Africans did, when the world had on-

ly one continent. Many sovereign citizen organizations teach

that whenever a Moor’s name is spelled in capital letters in a

government document, the name identifies not the individu-

al but instead his “corporate shell identity,” or in other

words a “straw man” controlled by the government. See

Southern Poverty Law Center, “Sovereign Citizens Move-

ment,” www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideol

ogy/sovereign-citizens-movement.

Although the Moorish Science Temple does not buy the

“sovereign citizen” line, many of its members do. Many of

them argue, without any basis in fact, that as a result of

eighteenth-century treaties the United States has no jurisdic-

tion over its Moorish inhabitants, who are therefore under

no obligation to pay taxes. That is Bey’s position, but he does

not explain how it entitles him to an $11.5 billion refund

from the State of Indiana and/or its subdivisions. Nor is

there any basis for his contention that he is not required to

pay any taxes because being a Moor makes him a sovereign

citizen; he may be a Moor but—we emphasize, in the hope

of staving off future such frivolous litigation—he is not a

sovereign citizen. He is a U.S. citizen and therefore unlike

foreign diplomats has no immunity from U.S. law. Indeed

his suit is frivolous and was therefore properly dismissed; he

was lucky to be spared sanctions for filing such a suit.

No. 16-1589 5

Although we have discussed the MSTA at some length,

our aim was to introduce readers who may not be familiar

with the “sovereign citizen” movement to its principal insti-

tutional establishment. We do not mean to task the district

judges of this circuit with having to delve into the history of

every particular organization involved in every case before

them. Often the organization either played no significant

role in the events leading up to the case or if it did, neverthe-

less it was an organization already well known to the court.

The unusual feature of this case is that the sovereign-citizen

movement and its institutions, such as MSTA, are at once

sources of difficult litigation and not well known outside the

sovereign-citizen movement.

The judgment of the district court is affirmed.