Back in 2009, after a raid on his businesses in 2007, Bernard
von NotHaus, the man behind the Liberty Dollar, was arrested and
charged with various crimes connected to counterfeiting. He
was convicted
in federal court in North Carolina in 2011, but has still
not been sentenced.
As I wrote in 2011:
His conviction was based on the premise that a minted round of
nearly pure silver that is neither the same size nor denomination
as any existing U.S. coin and does not display identical imagery is
nonetheless a counterfeit of U.S. currency. In a press release
announcing the conviction, U.S. Attorney Anne Tompkins described
the Liberty Dollar as a form of “domestic terrorism.”Von NotHaus, who once ran an organization called the National
Organization for the Repeal of the Federal Reserve and Internal
Revenue Codes, explicitly advertised his silver product as
competition to federal fiat money. He called the Liberty Dollar a
“voluntary private barter currency,” a phrase that appeared on the
coins in later mintings.
See
this from 2012 for many of the details of the convoluted
case, and this on the original
raids on Liberty Dollar.
This week, a long-simmering motion to have his conviction
overturned was
denied by U.S. District Judge Richard Vorhees.
Summation and excerpts from Vorhees’ order:
these post-conviction filings present a question as to the
scope and extent of Congress’s constitutional power to coin
money and regulate its value whether Congress, under the
Constitution and by enactment of 18 U.S.C. § 48 and its prohibition
of coins “intended for use as current money,” has the power to
coin money to the exclusion of all others,
including individuals like Defendant von
Nothaus…..
After presenting a series of what he sees as precedent
decisions in support of his conclusion, Vorhees writes:
the undersigned is of the opinion, and this Court so
finds as a matter of law, that Congress indeed possesses the
power to criminalize an individual’s minting of coinage,
whether in resemblance of U.S. coins or of original design, that is
intended for use as current money.
Von NotHaus had more arguments:
Defendant contends that in order to be “current,” the U.S.
money with which the Liberty Dollar is accused of seeking to
compete must be genuine items of U.S. currency presently
in circulation and of the same denomination…..According to the defense, because the United States
does not mint silver coins in denominations of $5, $10, $20, and
$50, the values of the accused Liberty Dollar pieces, the
conviction under § 486 must be vacated. The undersigned
declines to construe the phrase “intended for use as current money”
as narrowly as the defense proposes…..
the Court construes 18 U.S.C. § 486 such that,
regardless of the nature of the subject coin (in resemblance
or of original design), if a coin is “intended for use as
current money” then there must necessarily be a deceptive
quality about its design. In other words, resemblance and
original design, while capable of independent existence, are not
necessarily mutually exclusive under a plain reading of the
statute.
The rest of Vorhees’ opinion knocks down von NotHaus’ claims of
insufficient evidence of criminal intent, that the jury was given
improper instructions on the extent of the government’s exclusive
power to coin money, and that some of the evidence against him
given by federal agents should be considered inadmissable
hearsay.
As noted in this
Coinweek story on the case, von NotHaus is scheduled
to finally receive sentencing in this case on December 2, reminding
readers that the 70-year-old man has been awaiting sentence for
over 3 and a half years now.
from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/1zpSC1a
via IFTTT