Assizes, Grand Juries, Lay Inquests, and Kevin Annett’s Tribunals

by Mary W Maxwell, LLB

Upon receiving a copy of my new book, The Soul of Boston and the Marathon Bombing, a friend wrote to me that he found it inspiring. Wow.  So I asked him what was the most inspiring part.  He said “about grand juries.”

Good heavens, I did not even realize there was anything about grand juries in that book — though I have often written about it. For example, this is what I said in my 2011 book Prosecution for Treason:

“Prior to the 20th century, grand juries were creatures of the community. Historically, the community precedes the state. Every society has a mechanism for charging someone with wrongdoing even if that mechanism consists only of gossip or of wreaking vengeance on him privately….

“The American colonists brought from Mother England the system of grand juries — grand in the sense of large, they have up to 23 members. Grand juries do not try an accused. They only determine if there is enough evidence to bring an indictment.

“The 23 persons are typically empaneled for two years and during that time they can bring any crime to the attention of the state. In colonial days these persons also looked for problems such as a bridge that needed repair. They acted as inspectors of prisons after all, prisoners are at the mercy of sadists if no one is taking a look. …

“You can start your own grand jury. Without making any claim to be official, you can set about doing what the colonial grand juries used to do. Why not? Just gather some folks together and list the wrongs being committed publicly by officials. That is surely your protected right, if not duty. …

“In medieval England an entity of this type was called the Clarendon Assize. Grounding one’s idea in an actual prototype like that helps people accept it more readily. Or you could modestly call it a Lay Inquest.”

Being now “inspired” by my friend who was inspired by me, I undertake to state again how “the people” can potentially overcome the way “protected individuals” constantly escape the force of the law. The fact is, officials won’t arrest them. Or, if they get arrested by mistake, a bit of magic is pulled out of a hat and they go free.

History of the Assize

In the Prosecution for Treason book I recommended adopting the name “Clarendon assize” for your local meetings of informal grand jury.  I now want to withdraw that suggestion, as the word assize from the 12th century in England had some other meanings, too.

For a time, it referred to judges who rode around (on horseback, what else?) to the shires to perform normal court duties. I am trying to emphasize community-based authority, not the established institution of the judiciary.

It is also interesting to realize — but is off-topic from where we are going here, that the assize court had some functions of countering the ecclesiastical court.  This was sometimes related to cases where the Church claimed ownership of land, but the king wanted to claim it. Two authorities at loggerheads — that often helps liberate us.

And don’t forget, in the case of Martin Luther protesting corrupt practices of the Church in 1517, the two authorities at loggerheads were the people and the Church.  And the people won! (I pass over the fact that it was on October 31 that Luther posted his 95 complaints to the door of the church at Wittenburg.)

American Grand Juries, State and Federal

As mentioned recently at Gumshoe, a group called “Lawyers for 9-11 Truth” has gone to the court of the US District for Southern New York to demand that a grand jury be established to look at the evidence regarding the fall of the Twin Towers in 2001.

That group made its plea in May 2018 and have not received the appropriate reply “Sure! We’ll get right onto that. Thanks for thinking of it!”  This is because the federal government has long since squelched the layman’s function.

The Department of Justice, don’t you love that name, says it is in charge. It will tell the grand jurors what to do and it will give a green light or red light to the indictments that any grand jury proposes.  In other words, we are right back where we started with the problem of the Protected Persons being un-arrestable.

Citizens in Boston could easily set up a Lay Inquest concerning the 2013 Marathon bombing. I now recommend NOT calling it a grand jury or even a wannabe grand jury. Just call it a lay inquest. You will lack two of the important powers a real grand jury has — the summoning of witnesses and the subpoena’ing of evidence. But you can make polite requests for those things.

Seriously, seriously — I’m being serious.  Waiting for “Godot” is not leading us to any goal. You can do the most modest thing in the world. Even a party of three at your kitchen table is better than nothing.

You can lay out, for example, some names of persons that may have good information about that “martial law” day in Watertown, Massachusetts — April 19, 2013. (I pass over the fact that April 19th, the day Tamerlan Tsarnaev died, is a biggie on the Occult calendar.  It is Beltane, whereupon killing is the delicious thing to do.)

Probably the main rough punishment that will hit the Lay Inquest folks is an embarrassment. Others may mock you. But don’t be put off by that! It’s a very good sign. It means they are trying to stop you. Just brush it off, OK? It is better than having your house burned down.

The Mocking of Kevin Annett

If you ask Google to provide photos or images of Kevin Annett, you will find that about half of them are of the mocking type. This is a good sign. Somebody up there feels that the public needs to be warned against believing that Kevin has good ideas.

Why? Because he has good ideas. You won’t find serious articles yanking down the edifice he has created. There are only insulting remarks, some of them quite humorous.

I have just googled for Annett’s website ITCCS.org. That stands for International Tribunal for Crimes of Church and State.

Annett discovered in the 1990s that many indigenous children were killed in the Residential Schools. He did not believe it at first (who would believe such a thing?)but finally obtained evidence.

I could tell you now the steps he went through to make justice happen. I consider his efforts successful. But instead I will show you how they are described by a mocker.

Amazingly, when I typed into the browser “ITCCS.org,” I didn’t get taken to that website, as is Google’s normal practice. I got taken to a google page of offerings relevant to that subject.

Was Annett’s website — with exactly that name — the first item on the list? Nope. If you pay to have your article appear higher, you can supersede even the basic item. For ITCSS.org the top item you get is  RationalWiki.org.

Rational Wiki’s Take on Kevin Annett

Here, for the rest of this article,  is the full mocking piece, as composed by an entity called Rational Wiki (which I wouldn’t accuse of being very rational):

The International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State or ITCCS (allegedly est. on June 15, 2010) is a one-man blog that pretends to be a tribunal established to enforce common law.

Kevin D. Annett (born in 1956 of the Nation of Kanata Canada is the founder and operator of a series of crank one-man blogs and phony organisations, the most famous among these being the above mentioned juridical quagmire of nonsense and pseudolaw, the ITCCS.

Annett has also fraudulently claimed to be a Nobel peace prize nominee, a laughable claim which is completely out of the question. Even so, being nominated doesn’t mean squat. Oblivious to all this, some crackpots connected to the militia movement took the time to congratulate Annett on this non-existent Nobel peace prize nomination.^[11]

Annett writes in his International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State:

Our Mandate: (1) To lawfully prosecute those people and institutions responsible for the exploitation, trafficking, torture and murder of children, past and present, and (2) To stop these and other criminal actions by church and state, including by disestablishing those same institutions. (That is  Kevin Annett playing one-man Russian roulette with “international litigation” loaded in the chamber.)

With the ITCCS, Annett attempts to mimic genuine international organisations, and is actually good enough at this to have fooled a few normal people (and a lot of raving conspiracy-prone nutters) into thinking there’s anything at all to this. … It should also be noted that most genuine international legal bodies are not “Proudly powered by WordPress”.

The International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State or ITCCS came to some notice in the social media sphere in February 2013, when Annett issued a claim that Pope Benedict XVI resigned for fear of arrest on an ITCCS warrant and the hard of thinking forwarded it around as if this actually made sense. …

In March of the same year, Annett boldly took new steps and “convicted” two consecutive Popes of genocide and child trafficking, issuing “international arrest warrants” for them.

The ITCCS website also sports a prominent link to a so-called “Common Law Community Training Manual”, which is basically a Sovereign citizen FAQ. They also have a collection of “Common Law Court Documents”, in case you were looking for a pseudolaw starter kit.

[still continuing with rationalwiki’s article]:

International Common Law Court of Justice

At the heart of the “organization” is something Annett calls the International Common Law Court of Justice or ICLCJ, which is rather similar to those “common law courts” sometimes set up by freemen on the land, right down to the “citizen jurors”. This court, however, exists only in the mind of Annett.

Tribunal into Crimes against Humanity

Annett has accused the Vatican and the British government of trying to block the clearly real and important actions of his Tribunal, stating;

Despite efforts by the British government and the Vatican to obstruct the Tribunals, including by deporting and harassing its leading members, survivors of church and state terror will gather in five countries to present evidence and come to a judgement concerning church-sponsored genocide, murder and the continued trafficking in children. We intend to …bring indictments against the Roman Catholic and numerous Protestant churches, as well as the Crown of England, for mass murder and the continued trafficking and torture of children.

In 2011, the powers that be apparently lost the ability to hold back the tidal wave force of the TCH (Tribunal into Crimes against Humanity), which was claimed by Annett to finally have convened in several world capitals globally (including Brussels, London and Ottawa), supposedly present in all these places at once to physically arrest the globalist heads of some vast conspiracy.

It goes without saying that none of these arrests took place or were even attempted — Kevin probably didn’t even leave his own basement on that very day. Still, in the same proclamations, he literally goes on to impersonate law enforcement, claiming to have “Common Law Peace Officers” at the standby to enforce his weird rants….

Accosting the Native Canadian Community

Annett claims (to this day) to have been personally chosen by the native Canadian community to (pseudo)legally represent them, previously also having made his money claiming to represent their interests. Until they told him to damn well stop it.

Before his press releases about arresting popes, Annett was known for making extensive claims of exposing ritual murder of native children in residential schools. He was active in native activist organisations in Canada— which he had a habit of using to raise money for himself, claiming their support and endorsement until forced to desist.

Annett’s explanation for all this is to claim that all official representatives of native Canadians are corrupt and have agreed to keep the deaths of thousands of children secret.

Despite the attempts to limit his abuse of real topics, he has since went on to make outright pseudohistorical claims. From his webpage:

We have forensic proof now that countless children are buried in mass graves near former church schools, orphanages and sweatshops across Canada, America, England, Ireland and Australia” said ITCCS spokesman Kevin Annett today.

Editor’s note; I have left the embedded links in, as many of them take you to Annett’s items that are useful!