Sovereign citizen won't be getting a free Range Rover from Herb Chambers; in fact, he now owes dealership's lawyers more than $41,000

A federal judge in Boston has ordered a Rhode Island sovereign citizen to pay attorneys for a Herb Chambers dealership $41,457 for the time they had to spend cleaning up the legal mess he created for the dealership after it refused to give him the free Range Rover he wanted.

Herb Chambers Jaguar Land Rover of Boston sued Deric Marcell Thompson of Woonsocket in April after he responded to its rejection of a $3.5 quintillion "certificate of deposit" for the SUV he wanted by filing a series of IRS and UCC documents that had the potential to interfere with the dealership's ability to obtain financing for the vehicles it was offering.

In July, US District Court Judge William Young sided with Herb Chambers over Thompson. Thompson, who represented himself, had responded to the dealership's filings with long, rambling motions, several with old US postage stamps attached with his signature over the stamps, in which he cited various legal-sounding doctrines on why Chambers owed him a pricey 2022 SUV plus, because of all the time he had been forced to spend on the case, another 14 of the vehicles, plus "free unlimited full maintenance" plus more than $4 million, to be paid in silver dollars rather than "Federal Reserve notes."

Young held a bench trial, lasting a day, and basically told Thompson to knock it off.

Young agreed with Chambers attorney Edward Cooley to set a value on the time Cooley and an associate spent on the case, both for the lawsuit and for efforts to wipe Thompson's bogus IRS and UCC filings. Cooley responded he and his associate had spent a total of 146 1/4 hours on the case and that because of his long-standing association with Chambers, he had given them a rate of $340 an hour, rather than the $400 to $450 he normally charges. His associate's fee of $210 an hour was also discounted from her usual rate, he wrote.

Thompson, who acknowledged in one filing he was a Sovereign, used other, more subtle clues to show he is not bound by so-called laws, such as spelling his name with odd punctuation, for example, :Deric-Marcell: Thompson: but sometimes a less formal Deric-Marcell: Thompson and sometimes followed by a copyright symbol and a notice that his name is "properly spelled only in upper and lower case letters." Also, he was a "defendant-in-error" and, of course, sui juris. His most recent filing, this week, questioned whether Chambers's attorney actually represented Chambers.

Young rejected that line of questioning and then formally filed an order requiring Thompson to fork over the money.