[Title: ‘Treason!’ Moorish Americans facing gun charges create disarray in Md. courtroom
Note: Black "Moorish Americans" are a splinter group from the Moorish Science Temple of America with ideology borrowed from the usually white supremacist anti-government Sovereign Citizen movement]

Two Moorish Americans — who claim to be sovereign citizens of a fictitious North African empire — were scheduled to make their first appearance in front of Judge Monise Brown for several gun-related charges.
Lamont Butler and George Neal-Bey were arrested after a confrontation with Charles County sheriff’s deputies during a traffic stop last month. Both men were armed at the time. Butler was also charged with resisting arrest.
[...]
In 2013, he tried to occupy a 12-bedroom Bethesda mansion worth $6 million and was charged with breaking and entering, fraud and attempted theft.
But Butler — who claims to be the consul general of the “Morocco Consular Court at the Maryland State Republic” — argued that the mansion fell under an 1836 treaty between Morocco and the United States and actually belonged to him. It didn’t work.
[...]
On Friday morning, the judge had barely spoken when Butler made his first objection. He went by a different name — Lamont Maurice El — and did not consent to standing in for this other person, even though that “other person” was legally him.
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“I’m not making an appearance, first of all,” Butler replied. “As long as the grass grows green, as long as the water runs downhill, as long as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, we will never come together. We are separate people.” [...] “I am invoking my treaty right,” he immediately said, referencing Morocco, a country 4,000 miles away.