In a case reminiscent of the bizzare tale of Jennifer Melisa Herring in North Carolina, a Utah woman and purported “sovereign citizen” has been charged with fleeing police in an automobile.
Lisa Ann Sovereen, 44, refused to pull over and led the Utah Highway Patrol on a high-speed chase on an Interstate highway, KSL.com reports.
Sovereen explained that she was “not required to pull over and that police had stolen her previous vehicle and taken her blood,” the station reports.
Jail records in Salt Lake County list the Sovereen name as an alias used by Lisa Ann Bluth.
Harvey Douglas Goff, the Utah man who engaged in a bizarre hectoring campaign against public officials at the local, state and federal levels, has been sentenced to 36 months in federal prison and ordered to stay away from “sovereign citizen” groups for three years after his release.
Goff is expected to begin his prison sentence by May 30, after being permitted to self-surrender. He pleaded guilty in December to obstruction of justice.
U.S. District Judge David Nuffer sentenced Goff Monday, ordering three years’ supervised release in addition to the prison term.
Among other things, Goff was accused of filing a false lien that sought $53 trillion. He also was accused of asserting that a “judge had provided him with tens of millions of dollars in cash in ‘suspicious’ transactions,” federal prosecutors said.
“Sovereign citizens” have been known to try to intimidate public officials or turn the tables on them by submitting fraudulent reports to the IRS.
As part of a plea agreement, Goff “admitted that between April and July of 2010 he endeavored to obstruct and influence the administration of justice in U.S. Tax Court,” federal prosecutors said. “He admitted that he repeatedly filed false and fictitious forms in a national database.”
Some of Goff’s legal woes began after a traffic stop by police in Ogden. Goff retaliated by filing false liens for extraordinary sums, prosecutors said.
At one point, prosecutors said, Goff claimed “diplomatic immunity.”
Robert Clifton Tanner, the purported Louisiana “sovereign citizen” implicated in a cross-border plot to file bogus financial judgments against state-court judges and others in Utah, has pleaded guilty to federal charges of mail fraud and has been sentenced to 30 months in prison.
One of the documents was styled “Petition for Agreement and Harmony in the Nature of a Notice of International Commercial Claim Administrative Remedy,” federal prosecutors in Utah said.
Tanner is 45. His co-defendant, Maria Melody Fuentes Cecil Mobo, 42, of Spanish Fork, Utah, is scheduled to go on trial Feb. 25. She is charged with four counts of mail fraud.
Bogus filings by the pair asserted they were owed billions of dollars by judges and others, prosecutors said.
As part of a plea agreement with the 30-month sentence for Tanner, “other state and federal jurisdictions in Louisiana and Utah had agreed to forgo additional charges against” him.
The sentence was imposed by U.S. District Judge David Sam.
