Jamestown Sun – by Arielle Zionts
NEW UNDERWOOD, S.D. – For six months, a western South Dakota man who has beliefs similar to the sovereign citizens movement refused to pay his water bill and now faces prison time after the New Underwood City Council voted to report him to police.
James Kopecky, 57, was in court Tuesday, Nov. 27, to answer to two felony charges: grand theft for allegedly stealing $1,239 worth of city water and refusing to provide a DNA sample in connection with the case. Kopecky’s longtime partner, 51-year-old Misty Koch, has been charged with aiding and abetting the theft.
The pair’s arraignment at state court in Rapid City was rescheduled, however, after Kopecky was argumentative with Judge Heidi Linngren.
“You don’t get to interrupt me,” Linngren told Kopecky as he made his various legal arguments, sometimes looking down at his hand-written notes.
“Stop, stop,” she continued, or you will end up over there, gesturing to where jailed defendants were sitting.
Kopecky’s court-appointed lawyer, Paul Pietz, said his client does not believe in the jurisdiction of the court and has ordered him not to talk or approach him. Kopecky, who said he wants to represent himself, refused to enter a plea Tuesday, saying he believed it would be double jeopardy to do that after already doing so in magistrate court.
Linngren rescheduled the arraignment for 1:15 p.m. on Dec. 18 and as part of their bond conditions ordered the couple to meet with their lawyers. She said if they want to make arguments about jurisdiction and representing themselves, they need to do it with written motions.
Kopecky identifies as a sovereign citizen, two deputies with the Pennington County Sheriff’s Office wrote in their police reports. Sovereign citizens are known to believe in various conspiracy theories, but their main tenant is that people are sovereign from the U.S., and therefore don’t have to follow laws, pay taxes or answer to government authorities.
During an interview with a deputy, the reports say, Kopecky said the U.S. Treasury needs to certify his city water bill as a “true bill” and offset the cost since he only uses silver dollars.
Kopecky also accused a deputy of conducting an “unlawful citizens arrest” in a letter to the city, the reports say. “Law is supreme, it never yields to some man-made code, statute or any other private rule,” he wrote.
Court records show that instead of signing his name on the document, he wrote “under duress” so it read “signed under duress.”
Speaking outside the courthouse Tuesday, Kopecky and Koch said they’re not sovereign citizens and disagree with the movement.
Koch called followers of the movement “cop killers” and recommended the writings of Anna von Reitz, a self-proclaimed judge and conspiracy theorist who is popular in the movement, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that analyzes extremist and hate groups.
Kopecky said he identifies as an “American state national” and that state court doesn’t have jurisdiction over him. He said the American Bar Association actually stands for British Accredited Registry and has registered all Americans as property of the queen of England.
The New Underwood City Council voted to ask for criminal charges against Kopecky because “all other means of trying to contact him to make payments (were not working out), and it got to the point where he was just stealing water,” Mayor Jack Trullinger said Tuesday in a phone interview.
Kopecky was also making city staff feel uncomfortable, he added.
Kopecky’s water was initially shut off in December 2017 for nonpayment, the police reports say. After it appeared that Kopecky turned the water back on by himself, the city put a padlock on the pipe leading to the valve. However, the city later learned that Kopecky was watering his yard and after digging there found that the pipe had been cut. The city claims the pipe was cut a second time as well.
But Kopecky said after Tuesday’s hearing that he has paid the water bills. Koch said she hasn’t lived in the house for two years so she’s not sure why she was charged.
If found guilty, the pair could serve up to two years in prison for the grand theft charges. Kopecky faces up to another five years for refusing to provide a DNA sample.
New Underwood, however, only wants what is owed to the city, according to the mayor.
“We’re not looking for him to go to jail,” Trullinger said. “We just want our bill paid.”
The FBI considers the sovereign citizens movement a domestic terror threat since some followers have committed financial crimes and threatened or killed police officers and other government workers.
An estimated 300,000 Americans are part of the movement and many with sovereign citizens beliefs reject the label and instead call themselves state nationals, according to a profile of the group by the SPLC.
this guy needs to get to this site and listen, learn and look at the mandamus
this man ‘stole’ nothing
the corporation is attempting to steal his essence
Kopecky is half correct, in that he is a sovereign, but citizen is his choice to be an underling of a corporation.
Is that a correct assessment, or do I need to go back and listen to the CD, again?
I’m in a water fight myself with a neighboring county that swooped up our community water and is Agenda 21ing us.
Thats the problem with words like citizen or national. They are defined the same. As a slave.
I am a potentate for that reason.
why would he need to give dna? Weird!
I am an individual free sovereign national of the united States of these Americas. My nationalism is what entitles me as the sovereign for this nation to that ratified law known as the Bill of Rights, which emphasizes my freedom and sovereignty.
A potentate is a king all right, but our Bill of Rights was not written in that context.
And when you make it clear that though you are a national of the soil you were born upon, and then make it clear that you are not a citizen, you claim your rights without conditions.
I don’t know about the DNA thing, it will probably become a nation wide star chamber court rule that you cannot file without giving up your DNA.
This has gone on way too long and has gone way to far. They would have never done this to my dad and they goddamn sure would have never done this to my grandpa, and they didn’t even have the internet, they just had guns and wouldn’t put up with it.
VERY WELL EXPLAINED BROTHER.
The supreme court ruled in MARYLAND v. KING that DNA can be taken from any individuals who are arrested but not yet convicted of a crime. This is insane!!! the 4th Amendment be damned…. see https://www.npr.org/2013/06/03/188397999/supreme-court-rules-arrest-dna-collection-reasonable
Time for the nooses for these traitors….
let me guess what kind of court he is in.
All is normal……so if I don’t pay my water bill I get a felony and then I can not own firearms anymore.
Felonies for everyone and everything. Meanwhile those who refuse any of the dictates of the gangs in control will be taken care of one by one and soon there will no longer be any resistance at all.
They do what they want to us and we just go on letting them do it so I guess we deserve it.
The price for failing to organize in a professional manner equal to or better than the dimwits they use against us will be death, imprisonment or mental mind washing and tracking via implants.
I myself think it is to late. We waited to long and now we will pay the price. I really hope I am wrong but looking back at history I doubt that I am.
The days of resistance are almost over as their surveillance state is almost complete.
They are not putting up all those ominous ugly looking microwave towers for nothing you know.
“I myself think it is to late. We waited to long and now we will pay the price. I really hope I am wrong but looking back at history I doubt that I am.
The days of resistance are almost over as their surveillance state is almost complete.
They are not putting up all those ominous ugly looking microwave towers for nothing you know.”
Who the f-k do you think you are fooling, you f-king shill?
So you think it is too late before there has even been a f-king fight, huh?
I bet you wish it was too late. Go dig a hole and crawl inside it if you are a coward. As far as your knowledge of history, I guess you must have skipped American history. Today we are far above that rag tag army of patriot subjects that whipped the king of England, the mightiest army with the highest technological weapons at the time.
Tell you what, buddy, go back to your masters and tell them you found no defeatism in the Trenches. Just a bunch of pissed off American nationals waiting for the tyranny to climb up the ladder far enough to get this conflict a going. If they could whip us why haven’t the punk bitches done it yet? I’ll tell you why, because it is all a f-king bluff. We will wipe our enemy off this planet and you are one of the low life f-kers working to perpetuate their pathetic bluff they are trying to pull in front of the biggest best armed army on planet earth.
No sale and you are through earning your pay here.
Bye.
kinganu
Your a damned coward…wasting anymore words on your weak ass is useless…