Chicago Sovereign Given 7-year Sentence for Filing False $100 Billion Liens
Once upon a time, it must have seemed like a good idea to Cherron Phillips, a 44-year-old antigovernment "sovereign citizen" from Chicago, to file a series of frivolous $100 billion liens against some of the most powerful federal judges and prosecutors in the city in retaliation for the prosecution and conviction of her brother on drug charges.
But on Tuesday, in a federal courtroom in Chicago, that good idea turned into a 7-year prison sentence for the visibly shaken Phillips, a former math teacher, successful real estate agent and insurance broker, according to the Chicago Tribune.
The Tribune reported that in passing the sentence, U.S. District Court Judge Michael Reagan described Phillips’ campaign to harass and intimidate public officials as “death by a thousand paper cuts.”
Reagan was brought in to handle the case because of concerns of a conflict of interest of Chicago-based federal court officials, whose colleagues, including former U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, were targets of Phillips’ campaign of paper terrorism. The sentence she received, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, was six months longer than federal sentencing guidelines recommend.
For her part, Phillips, a mother of two, who now calls herself River Tali Bey, stayed sovereign to the end. At her sentencing she reportedly told the court that her jailing was “an unauthorized punishment that is not recognized by Congress or the Constitution.” She also admitted to being “confused.”
Phillips started filing the bogus liens in 2011 and was convicted last June on 10 counts of retaliation against a federal official. Phillips filed the liens with the Cook County recorder of deeds, according to the Tribune, after being barred from the federal courthouse for disrupting the proceedings in her younger brother’s drug conspiracy case.
For more than a year, Phillips insisted on representing herself in court. But eventually she was assigned a court appointed attorney, Lauren Solomon, who asked Tuesday that Phillips be given probation, adding that the sovereign citizen ideology is “nonsensical at best” and that jail and prison are breeding grounds for the movement.
“Can we really solve this with incarceration?” Solomon told the court, the Tribune reported.
For Phillips, being a sovereign citizen was apparently a family affair. Solomon told the court that Phillips mother and father had also run into trouble with the law and that they, too, were sovereign citizens. According to the Tribune, Phillips’ parents were once convicted on federal tax evasion charges in a case that featured filings by the couple heavy with sovereign citizen language and tactics, such as challenging the jurisdiction of the court.
At one point, Phillips, her parents and her younger brother, who was convicted on drug charges, were all in federal custody at the same time. Her father has been released from prison. Her mother, according to the Tribune, is scheduled to be released next spring.
Phillips and her family are not the first sovereign citizens in Chicago to make headlines or to clash with the federal government. In 2012, just before Christmas, Joseph Banks, 37, a sovereign citizen and convicted bank robber, one of the most prolific in Chicago history, made a daring, Hollywood-style jail break.
Banks and another inmate, Kenneth Conley, a fellow bank robber but non-sovereign citizen, squeezed through a tiny window at the high rise federal jail in downtown Chicago, scaled down 17 stories on a rope fashioned out of bed sheets, caught a cab and then disappeared into the pre-dawn darkness.
Banks did not get to enjoy his freedom for long. He was back in custody about 48 hours later. His escape partner remained free for two more weeks before he was recaptured.
Still, the federal prison system might want to keep better track of its sheets. Another sovereign citizen is on her way.
