Abstract

Sovereign Citizens are a rising ideological group whose beliefs are founded upon rejecting the current legal and judicial system of the United States. Beyond threats of physical violence and domestic terrorism, Sovereign Citizens and other disruptive criminal defendants threaten to further clog an already struggling criminal justice system through vexatious pro se filings with no real legal basis. While on their face, the arguments promulgated by Sovereign Citizens represent a bad-faith attempt to engage in the judicial process, they also undermine and erode the constitutional rights of litigants who present them in court. The issue becomes three-fold when considering the impacts court clogging has on other defendants whose trials inherit cumbersome delays, which in turn limits their due process and rights to a speedy trial.

This Note argues that in order to more adequately address these issues, the Supreme Court should turn to a balancing test that would enable courts to restrict pro se litigation in criminal cases where courts’ interest in efficiency and other defendants’ rights to due process and a speedy trial outweigh the defendant in question’s due process interests in litigating their case pro se. This balancing test would be established relying on previous Supreme Court decisions in Powell v. Alabama and Johnson v. Zerbst. The Court seemingly overruled limitations on pro se criminal representation in Faretta v. California, which has had a profound impact on the judicial system’s ability to deal with disruptive pro se defendants. If left unchecked, the rising dissemination of legal misinformation may further exploit a judicial system lacking an adequate means to address such defendants, making it ripe for abuse.

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