The-Ave.US

It probably won’t surprise you that I immediately suspected the two requests were connected. Sure enough, the last names and social security numbers matched. What I had in front of me was the parents of a long-lost child, and the long-lost child, requesting each other’s addresses – by coincidence, on the same day, within an hour of each other  – 17 years and 11 months after they were separated by court action.

Obviously, consent wasn’t going to be a problem, but I had to go through the procedures of notifying all parties in writing of the requests and advising them of their right to refuse to consent to disclosure of their addresses. I mailed them consent forms along with the canned notification letters. There was a complication. Because Myra wasn’t 18 yet, her legal guardian had to sign the consent form. So I called Grandma on the phone, explained the situation, and asked her if she would sign the consent form if I mailed it to her. Her response was, “Hell no, those people are no good, and Myra shouldn’t have anything to do with them!” Consequently, I had to formally deny both requests. It probably won’t surprise you that the parents and Myra both filed appeals of the denial letters, which went to an office in Olympia to be scheduled for a formal hearing before a judge.

In the denial letter to Myra, I informed her that she could resubmit her request after she turned 18. Which, of course, she did, along with a signed consent form. And I probably don’t need to tell you that on the day of her 18^th birthday, her parents were in their car out in the parking lot waiting for our office to open, and showed up at the service counter at precisely 8 a.m., where I was holding a sealed envelope with Myra’s address in it. Before I handed it over to them, I told them what city Myra was living in, and informed them they had about a four-hour drive ahead of them to get there, and that Myra was expecting them to arrive around noon. It brings tears to my eyes to tell you this story, which had a happy ending. I wish like hell I could have been there, but I was being paid by the taxpayers to do the public’s work, so I couldn’t leave the office, and besides public servants like me aren’t supposed to get personally involved in cases they handle in their official capacity. I heard later the wedding went off without a hitch. I sure hope Myra and her beau are still happily married, will stay that way, and will grow old together. The odds are against them; half of all U.S. marriages end in divorce, and most divorces are acrimonious, and according to my sources in the marriage counseling profession about ninety percent of the marriages that survive are unhappy ones. I don’t know what happened to them, but I can dream, can’t I?

(And rightwingers would have you believe us faceless bureaucrats have no hearts … hmmm.)

That takes care of the first topic. The second topic involves misuse of the Public Records Act to harass government workers by whackos who hate government and take out their hatred of government on the people who do government work because they need a job to support their families. For this discussion, I’m going to focus on folks who call themselves “sovereign citizens.” Maybe you’ve heard of them, maybe not. The so-called “sovereign citizen” movement grew out of the tax protest movement of the sixties. Today it has no organization or leaders; all the people who created it are now either dead or in prison. It survives as an ad hoc movement in the byways and back alleys of the world of fringe movements, and probably continues to exist because a significant number of people make money from it, by running little cottage industries in their homes that sell seminars, tapes, books, and form kits to gullible people who are desperate to get government enforcement agencies off their backs that got on their backs after their lives fell apart and they became unable to pay their taxes, fines, child support, and/or other legal obligations. People like them are easy pickings for snake oil salesmen. I became one of Washington state government’s top legal experts on “sovereign citizens” because I had to deal with these malcontents frequently so it behooved me to read up on their ideology and methodology.

Their basic theory works like this. If a nation-state possessing an army can declare its sovereignty over a particular territory, why can’t you? The only thing stopping you is your own free will. (And your lack of an army to enforce your territorial claims, but that’s a nuance these folks missed.) Like any other government, you can become a sovereign entity by the simple act of declaration. As an interesting twist on the standard theory of nation-building, in the case of an individual, sovereignty is portable rather than territorial; therefore, your declaration of personal sovereignty creates a bubble that follows you wherever you go. I’m not sure how big it is, but I assume it extends at least three feet from your body in all directions. Supposedly this status deprives federal, state, and local governments of any jurisdiction over you (except admiralty jurisdiction, for matters rising on the high seas, which “sovereign citizens” recognize), which exempts you from paying taxes, obeying traffic laws, and so on. These people are heavily into symbolism. For example, if they are dragged into a court of law that displays a flag with a gold fringe on it, they will submit to the court because the gold fringe signifies it’s an admiralty court even if the only cases the court handles are small claims. Likewise, they won’t put ZIP codes on their mail, and will refuse to accept mail with a ZIP code on it, because doing so would negate their sovereignty and resubmit them to governmental authority. So does having a state-issued license plate on their cars, so they equip their vehicles with their own homemade cardboard “license plates.”

Alabama executed two “sovereign citizens” for an incident arising out of a routine traffic stop. On October 4, 1993, George Sibley and Linda Lyon Block gunned down Opelika police sergeant Robert Motley for requesting Sibley’s driver’s license, who didn’t have one. On May 10, 2002, Block became the last person to be executed in Alabama’s electric chair. Sibley, whose appeals lasted longer, was put to death by lethal injection on August 4, 2005. (At their trials, Sibley and Block refused to cooperate with their defense attorneys and argued the state couldn’t put them on trial because it hadn’t been properly readmitted to the Union after the Civil War. Stop and think about this. They were charged with a capital crime and facing the death penalty. Their survival was on the line. Could these two characters possibly have been rational, or were they insane?)

The “sovereign citizen” movement has a standardized methodology for harassing government workers that works like this. They submit a Public Records Act request to a public agency. What they’re requesting is immaterial, because no matter how the agency responds to it, they’ll claim the agency didn’t comply with the PRA. Their next step is to file a lien against the state – usually for a large sum, such as $1 billion.  Then they write checks to private businesses against the “account” created by the lien, which in their thinking works exactly like a bank checking account. Of course, it doesn’t, and they get arrested for check forgery. A variation of this technique is to file liens against the personal property of targeted public employees. Washington, like a number of other states, has taken proactive steps to protect public workers against such harassment by passing a law that requires a judge to sign off on any lien against a public servant before it’s filed. Failing to comply with this law is a felony, and you go to prison for it. This has effectively deterred most “sovereign citizens” from filing liens against public workers and has pretty much shut done that particular harassment, although a few fledgling “sovereign citizens” who haven’t gotten the word still occasionally get into serious trouble with the law by filing liens against judges, prosecutors, and other public servants.

The Public Records Act, of course, was never meant to be used as a tool to harass public workers, but government-haters routinely use it for that purpose. People like me who work for government have to be nimble to stay ahead of them. A typical public records request from these people is dozens of pages long and contains hundreds of requests. It’s all boilerplate, of course, which they got from a form kit they paid some kitchen-table entrepreneur $150 for, and a lot of it is poorly drafted. You’ll see requests for state records being asserted under the authority of the federal FOIA, for example. What I, and other public agency records officers, have to do with these is go through them, item by item, and respond to each item constituting a legitimate request and provide an explanation of denial for each item we don’t fulfill. For example, when they requested a xerox copy of the entire United States Code, which is about the same size as the Encyclopedia Britannica, I responded that a statute is a not a “public record” as defined by the PRA and therefore the agency didn’t have to provide them a copy of it. But the best tool I had for dealing with these harassers was the agency’s statutory authority to charge them 10 cents a page for the copies. If they wanted 100,000 pages of records, I told them in my formal written response, they would get them within 5 days after the agency received their payment of $10,000. I never had to copy 100,000 pages of anything, because none of them were willing to spend $10,000 of their own money to harass me.

The purpose of this discussion is to point out that some people are willing to use laws intended to benefit our citizens for malevolent purposes, and the people who work for government have to deal with that. The principle behind the Public Records Act is simple, and its purpose is benign, but the actual administration of the public records laws is highly complex and can do a lot of damage to real people’s lives if mishandled. You really do have to be an expert, and possess good judgment, to handle a public records request properly, in a way that protects individual rights yet gives members of the public what the law intends to give them.

I’ll close this article on public records laws with another anecdote. Some years ago, the Blaine School District received a public records request from the ACLU’s Seattle office. School district administrators knew they had to give the ACLU the records they requested, but didn’t want to, so to harass the ACLU they refused to mail the records and insisted the ACLU send someone up to Blaine to pick them up at the school office. If you’re going to mess with an organization, pick one that isn’t full of civil rights lawyers who are experts on public records laws! The ACLU took the school district to court under the PRA penalty provisions, and this bit of nonsense ended up costing school district taxpayers $58,000 in penalties, not counting the school district’s legal expenses. These stubborn school administrators, bent on vexing the ACLU out of nothing more than pique, probably cost the taxpayers who fund their paychecks close to a half million dollars. They should all have been fired, but I’ll bet they weren’t. That’s how things work in the real world: People who don’t know what they’re doing, or do know but don’t care, screw up … and you get the bill.

Recently, reform legislation has been introduced in Olympia to take the private profit out of PRA infractions by public agencies. The agencies still would pay financial penalties, but the money would go to a public fund instead of private individuals. I don’t know whether it passed; I don’t think it did. The fact Stefan Sharansky collected $225,000 from King County Records and Elections for a technical violation of the PRA convinces me that we need such reform. It wouldn’t undermine the incentives for public agencies to comply with the PRA. At the same time, we do need to shut down the private profit-making business that some enterprising individuals have turned the PRA into.