Shake Down Entertainment, Ltd.
posted by Dave Hoffman
That’s the name of a corporation (or LLC?) created by members of the bizarre Baltimore gang profiled in this new article from the Washington Monthly. As reporter Kevin Carey writes, the incorporation helped to justify a RICO charge, which in turn led to the defendants adopting white supremacist arguments about the invalidity of the 14th Amendment as a defense to their murder charges. U.S. District Judge Davis didn’t adopt defendants’ view of the world. It’s a good lesson for potential crimelords in our audience: there’s nothing wrong with naming your gang corporation “Sweetness and Light Inc.” Points, incidentally, to the reader who comes up with additional examples of badly chosen corporate names.
The story reminds me a bit of this post I wrote on dockets and odd legal theories floating around. It seems that just as there is a world of undernews, there is a world of underlaw. Underlaw is that set of odd legal theories, strange filings, and misconstrued assertions of authority that laypeople pass to each other on the web and especially (as Carey writes) in prison cells. Although lawyers and judges scoff at these theories when they appear in Court, they are affecting the lives of those that believe them in ways we can only begin to imagine.
(H/T, with good analysis, Scott D.)
July 30, 2008 at 11:01 am
Posted in: Corporate Law
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Responses (2)
Hauk - July 30, 2008 at 3:17 pm
Apropos “underlaw,” Jon Siegel has a webpage devoted to detailing and debunking all of the bizarre legal theories that tax protestors use to justify not paying taxes. It’s available here:
http://docs.law.gwu.edu/facweb/jsiegel/Personal/taxes/IncomeTax.htm
Some of it makes for pretty entertaining reading.
On the same topic, as a law clerk, I encountered a pro se prisoner litigant who claimed that his conviction should be vacated because the criminal statutes under which he was convicted had no implementing regulations. Implementing regulations were not, of course, required, and the theory seemed pretty bizarre to me. My research, however, revealed this wasn’t the first time someone had advanced the theory.
Scott D - August 3, 2008 at 6:40 pm
Thanks for expanding the scope of this quirky story.
I like your concept “underlaw” and the links to examples. Drug-related conspiracy-making differs from most tax resisters as the concern is not conceptual opposition to government but resisting a specific action by government.
In any case, I have a new rationale for why this conspiracy has taken hold. Could it be there is an inherent suspicion and backlash regarding Federal mandatory minimum sentencing or the experience of being told while in prison that your charges change, switching to harsher federal punishments.
I am suggesting that certain types of underlaw spring forth from actual problems of law’s legitimacy. Exploring conspiracy theories in law, then, is akin to anthropology analyzing what cultural myths reflect about the world-view of the society.
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