COLUMN ONE : Their Own Kind of Justice : The Common Law movement’s rogue courts let those alienated by America’s legal system play judge and jury for a night. Radical members use the sessions to torment the government.

The Common Law court of Ohio, Our One Supreme Court, comes to order one night a week inside a cavernous strip mall bingo parlor where embittered castaways from American justice act out dreams of legal revolution.

It is a court with no legal standing and no connection to the judicial system, an experiment steeped in frustration, conducted without lawyers, without judges, without ponderous codes of criminal and civil procedure.

Hunkered down on folding chairs in front of an idled bingo blower, a jury of 12 men deliberates, issuing rulings based on its flawed interpretations of common law--the fundamental English legal principles that underpin America’s laws. The jurors are retirees and machinists, janitors and electricians, farmers and carpenters bound together by their disgust with the nation’s courts and a willful insistence that they can dispatch their own justice.

“You’re here to become free men,” Larry Russell, the court clerk, intones to 100 sympathizers who have come from across Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana to watch. Then he leads the jury on a long night of validating “quiet title” declarations, under which the court’s petitioners expect, in vain, to liberate themselves from the yoke of government.

Several dozen Common Law courts have sprouted throughout the Midwest, South and West in the past year, law enforcement officials and civil libertarians report. Movement leaders boast of up to 100 courts in 30 states--a claim unverified, say those monitoring the phenomenon, because so many operate in secrecy.

Most are little more than clubs for the disaffected, a chance to play judge and jury for a night. But the movement’s most radical activists have honed their populist yearnings into tactics of harassment, using the tribunals to interfere in genuine legal cases, issue dubious claims and plague the judicial system with thousands of pages of baseless filings.

“They’re playing Dungeons and Dragons with the legal system. It’s spooky,” said Berry F. Laws III, a Kansas City attorney who ignored an order to appear in June before a Wichita “people’s grand jury.”

Scores of Common Law court indictments have been sent to baffled judges, bankers and police. In San Francisco and Little Rock, Ark., Common Law “marshals” wearing authentic-looking badges have barged into federal courtrooms, trying to serve their documents on judges.

Officials targeted by Common Law courts often dismiss them as nuisances, but some have grown alarmed. Small-town magistrates and clerks in Western states have been threatened. Authorities are investigating the activities of Common Law courts in Arkansas, Florida, Kansas and Oklahoma. In Missouri, state police have tied an extremist Common Law court member to the attempted assassination of a highway patrolman.

“Law enforcement needs to take these people very seriously,” said Missouri Highway Patrol Sgt. Miles Parks, lead investigator of the sniper attack on Cpl. Bobbie J. Harper, who was wounded last year after arresting a Common Law activist.

Obscure Doctrine

Common Law courts are rooted in the same thicket of conspiracy theory that tangles the militia movement. But where paramilitary groups claim legal justification in the right to bear arms, the Common Law phenomenon is based on an obscure legal doctrine known as constitutionalism. Its knotty canon derives from biblical passages, kernels of historical truth and skewed interpretations of the Constitution and the common law. And, at its core, is the dogma of the Posse Comitatus, the short-lived rural movement in the 1970s and ‘80s that violently espoused anti-government and anti-tax beliefs.

The theories have little basis in fact, but Common Law court adherents study them with the zeal of first-year law students. Among the most outlandish: The Constitution is missing an original 13th Amendment, one that would have outlawed lawyers. Americans are divided between real citizens and “14th Amendment slaves” who allow themselves to be ruled by the federal government. The legal system’s courts only have authority over maritime cases.

“There may be a few grains of truth in what they say, but a lot of this stuff is wacky,” said Stephen Presser, a scholar of traditional common law and professor of legal history at Northwestern University. “To the unschooled, it can all sound real.”

Common Law tenets swirl through the literature of the apocalyptic right. Constitutionalist researchers hold forth in the AntiShyster, a Texas magazine that serves as the movement’s academic nerve center. Its pages are thick with obscure citations and articles on “Habeas Pocus” and “Income Tax: Mandatory or Voluntary?” Advertisements tout the Erwin Rommel School of Law in Chicago (“A splendid time is guaranteed for all”) and Dr. Eugene Schroder’s 130-page study guide on how Americans have lived under martial law since 1933.

The legal Establishment has been slow to react to the movement’s underground growth. American Bar Assn. officials are dimly aware of the movement but say they are confident that public education campaigns are the proper antidote.

“I can’t imagine these people having any impact,” said George Bushnell Jr., a Detroit attorney and recent president of the American Bar Assn.

But just an hour’s drive from Bushnell’s office, Common Law courts are active in small town halls in central Michigan and northeastern Thumb farming communities such as Sanilac County, birthplace of Oklahoma bombing suspect Terry L. Nichols.

Before his arrest in April, Nichols had long practiced the Common Law courtroom tactics espoused by the Posse Comitatus and other fringe groups. He told a Sanilac County judge in 1992 that he was empowered to issue his own worthless check to pay off $17,800 in defaulted credit card bills. Nichols said he had a “right under the Common Law”--a motion dismissed by the judge.

Intimidation Tactics

Common Law courts first surfaced two decades ago as a Posse Comitatus intimidation tactic against law enforcement agents, then faded as the anti-tax group dissolved and its leaders were jailed or died in firefights with police. Some survivors are among the new movement’s leaders. Leonard Ginter, an Arkansas Posse member who served a five-year sentence for harboring federal fugitive Gordon Kahl, leads a Common Law “Supreme Court” based in Smithville, Ark.

“We got death threats all the time. They wanted us to back down,” said Chuck Kupferer, a retired high-ranking U.S. marshal’s official who led the hunt for Kahl, who was killed in Arkansas during a shootout with federal agents.

Posse leaders claimed that the township was the highest form of American government and that Common Law reigns supreme over the nation’s 200-year codification of state and federal case law.

“The Posse operated under what they called ‘Christian Common Law,’ but it was pure vigilante justice,” said Daniel Levitas, a former director of the Center for Democratic Renewal who is researching a book on the Posse. “In large part, that’s what these courts are still about today.”

Among those at Tuesday court sessions in Columbus are “Patriots” who swear on the Bible by vowing, “So help me Yahweh.” The Old Testament Hebraic reference to God is used in legal documents--as well as religious references--by former Posse members and Christian Patriots, believers in the white-supremacist Christian Identity movement.

Yet interest in Common Law courts has spread beyond the paramilitary fringes. Among the curious who come to Columbus are people with no apparent extremist affiliation--senior citizens angry about taxes, couples embittered by their lack of job security, even Russell Thompson, a Cincinnati chemist disillusioned after he vainly fought a speeding charge in local court.

“If this gets some judges to listen to the people,” Thompson said, “how can it hurt?”

That sort of interest is taken by some legal critics as one more sign of the public’s impatience with the judicial system. Presser, for one, finds a degree of fascination in the movement’s populist “parallel court system” and its ancestry to 19th-Century frontier justice. But like most legal experts, he worries that “some people are being sold a bill of goods.”

Money is easily made inside the Common Law movement. Courses are taught by self-professed experts who charge as much as $2,500 per seminar.

The Columbus court started with the help of several traveling scholars. One was David Schethler, who is foreman of a Common Law grand jury in Wichita, Kan., and has planted courts across the Midwest. For $1,500, Schethler flew into Columbus last spring for an all-day seminar.

“It takes a long time and a lot of help to get to the essence of the Common Law,” Schethler said.

The Columbus court’s founders also traveled to Montana, paying a $2,400 “donation” to meet for four days in June with LeRoy Schweitzer, another Common Law guru. They had to sneak in. Schweitzer, who once spread his gospel by traveling, has been holed up in his armed compound since February, sought by federal agents on tax charges.

Court’s Beginnings

The Columbus court was formed last March by six Ohioans who shared disenchantment with the legal system. “We sat around one night and talked about how we all got burned,” said William H. Ellwood, a carpenter and a court founder. “Then we decided maybe we should start our own.”

Ellwood got into a losing fight with the Internal Revenue Service over back taxes. Embittered, he read anti-tax diatribes, then graduated to constitutionalist authors. Stopped two years ago for weaving in traffic, he is fighting the ticket in local courts, insisting on his “natural” right to travel freely.

Now grand jury foreman in Columbus, Ellwood is a walking trove of Common Law lore. He took over that role from Michael Hill, a former police officer and an Ohio militiaman who served as the court’s chief justice.

Hill, shot to death June 28 during a roadside confrontation with a Frazeysburg, Ohio, police officer, is the court’s martyr. His death has sharpened suspicions of government. Common Law court leaders fear they are the next targets. Files once left at Russell’s private office are now copied in triplicate and hidden. Ellwood carries his in an overstuffed lawyer’s valise.

“If one of us goes down, the court can still carry on,” he said.

Although tinged by paranoia, a court session in Columbus somehow proceeds like a sedate fraternal lodge meeting. No lawyers are allowed, but the audience--mostly middle-aged white men and a few women--wander in and out. They mill near a deli table and pick over literature with titles like “Sodomites on Trial” and “America the Conquered.”

The details of Common Law ideology--as opaque and shifting as quantum theory--require hours of study. Prospective jurors are tested after viewing “The Nitty Gritty Law School,” a videotape series touting the court’s validity. Court officers consult the Bible as often as they flip through Black’s Law Dictionary. Women can only serve on the 12-member “petit jury” if no men are available--a stricture one aide explains by scurrying to find a well-worn King James Version of the Bible.

Jurors spend most of their time deliberating over “quiet titles,” a procedure in which “14th Amendment slaves” are supposed to transform into “sovereign citizens.” Petitioners place ads in local newspapers for three weeks to inform creditors, tax agents and legal adversaries that they no longer have legal power.

“It’s like screaming over a loudspeaker that you’re a free man,” said Russell, who thumbs through filings with the imperious air of a loan officer, then applies an official-looking yellow wax stamp.

“Quiet titles” have no basis in law, legal experts say. But the customers leave satisfied.

“This is real,” declared Mike Maddox, an electrician who petitioned the Columbus court to become a “free man.” “It’s like what courts used to be, what they’re supposed to be. Kind of a retro thing, I guess.”

So far, the court’s edicts have not directly challenged the Ohio legal system. But Russell recently asked the state Supreme Court to give the Common Law court jurisdiction over a tax protest case. And earlier this year, a Lisbon, Ohio, man accused of growing marijuana demanded that a local judge transfer his case to the Common Law court. The man was convicted.

Ohio law officials dismiss Our One Supreme Court as irrelevant. “We already have a Supreme Court,” said Ted Almay, superintendent of the special investigation branch of the Ohio Bureau of Investigation.

“They’re ignoring us now,” Bill Ellwood said, “but down the road, they’ll have to take notice.”

In much of the rest of the heartland, they already have.

Common Law courts have meddled in legitimate court cases from Little Rock to San Francisco. Federal tax agents in Minnesota and Oklahoma have been sent threatening court orders from Common Law “jurats,” as they call themselves. In Wichita, the site of the nation’s most active Common Law court, a mass trial session drew 600 activists in June.

That weekend, a court docket and court computers were set up in a hotel lobby swarming with Common Law plaintiffs. Trials were conducted in several anterooms. “The only thing missing was defendants,” said Clark Dickson, who went at the request of Kansas City lawyer Laws, who received a summons from a Kansas Common Law grand jury.

In July, according to law enforcement officials, a Kansas Common Law court indicted President Clinton and Atty. Gen. Janet Reno for treason.

In the Common Law lexicon, treason is an all-purpose charge, often used when public officials ignore court dictates. A Hamilton, Mont., municipal judge was accused of treason for refusing to drop three traffic charges against a local “freeman.” The judge, Martha Bethel, took it seriously.

“I have heard threats such as that I would be kidnaped from my home, out of my offices or from my vehicle on the highway,” Bethel told an ad hoc hearing held in July by congressional Democrats.

Deputy U.S. marshals in San Francisco routinely monitor courtrooms where Common Law advocates are defendants in tax trials. Marshals began guarding the judge and jury overseeing one criminal tax case after they were sent treason indictments from a Common Law court based in Tampa, Fla. They had good reason: Several times, extremists dressed as federal marshals stood up in the courtroom and attempted to serve papers on court officers and jurors.

James Sullivan, chief deputy U.S. marshal based in San Francisco, said his agents have tried not to overreact. But “after Oklahoma City,” Sullivan said, “the atmosphere’s changed. It’s serious business now.”

So serious that Emilio Ippolito, the self-proclaimed Justice of the Common Law Constitutional Court of Tampa, has been targeted by a federal grand jury investigation. Last year, state agents raided Ippolito’s office, seizing two computers, video machines and 60,000 court files. He and his daughter, Susan Mokdad, are charged by Florida authorities with unauthorized practice of law.

Law enforcement authorities have employed that charge with growing frequency against Common Law activists. But it can backfire. A similar case filed against a Missouri Common Law court member escalated last year into an attempted assassination of a highway patrolman, an incident still reverberating along the hilly Missouri-Arkansas border.

It started in June, 1994, when a group of Missouri Highway Patrol troopers arrested Robert N. Joost, a Common Law court activist from McDonald County. Accused of “simulating legal process,” Joost had been sought on a state warrant for trying to serve a “people’s court” order on a trooper.

Three months later, one of the arresting troopers, Cpl. Harper, was shot as he spooned out a bowlful of birthday ice cream in his farmhouse kitchen. Fired by a sniper hiding in a creek bank, the bullet lodged one-sixteenth of an inch from Harper’s heart, almost killing him and forcing his retirement.

Believing Harper was targeted out of revenge for his arrest of Joost, investigators interviewed Timothy Coombs, an Arkansas man living at Joost’s farm while its owner was in the county jail. Coombs told troopers he was staying at the farm to “investigate” Joost’s arrest. Soon after, Coombs disappeared. Authorities issued a warrant for his arrest after investigators matched shell casings found on Harper’s property to an assault rifle Coombs owned.

Joost has yet to be charged in Harper’s shooting, but he is considered a strong suspect, said Highway Patrol Sgt. Miles Parks. In Joost’s farmhouse, investigators found a list with the names of Harper and other troopers.

After enduring a liver transplant and several other operations, Harper prefers not to talk about the shooting. He wants, Parks said, to put it in the past. But Parks and other investigators bluntly blame extremists in the Common Law movement.

“Bob’s a good old boy, he’s not the kind of person who’s got lots of enemies,” Parks said. “The way we look at it, this happened because these crazies were out there playing with their nonsense subpoenas. As far as we’re concerned, playtime is over.”

Times researcher John Beckham contributed to this story.