“The former investigator, Joseph R. Banister, 42, of San Jose, Calif., has become a hero to the tax protest movement, even though two of his clients are serving long prison sentences after following his advice,” the Timesfolk continued, carefully adding their formulaic second-graph “don’t try this at home” disclaimer.

“Mr. Banister was acquitted on charges of conspiracy and helping to prepare three false tax returns for a small California manufacturer,” The Times reported, in a story headlined “Protesters Win a Case Over I.R.S.”

“Everything I have done in my entire career at the I.R.S. and after, I’ve done with integrity and honesty,” Mr. Banister said after the verdict. “My clients wanted some answers to questions about what was required.”

“Mr. Banister resigned from the I.R.S. criminal investigation division in 1999 after he wrote a lengthy report asserting that no law requires the payment of taxes and that Americans were being tricked into paying them,” The Times reported.

I have read that report, available at www.freedomabovefortune.com. Basically, when Joe Banister told his superiors at the IRS that he could not continue arresting people at gunpoint for supposed failure to follow the law unless his superiors would answer his questions about what the law really says, they fired him.

Many on the Internet are asserting the Banister jury “ruled that no one has to pay the income tax.” I wasn’t there to cover the trial, but it appears from press reports his jury found Mr. Banister acted in good faith after his former employers declined to answer his questions, and that -- again in Sacramento last month -- the government failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Joe Banister is wrong.

Nor does the government generally accept jury verdicts, really. (After all, they know better than mere peons.) They’ll likely try to find other ways to ruin Mr. Banister’s career through regulatory channels, where no citizen sentinels stand guard.

“The defense relied heavily on the testimony of the government’s main witness, Dennis Brown, a longtime I.R.S. agent, who said it was proper for people to file protest returns as way to get their tax questions answered,” The Times reports. “The defense said that was what Mr. Banister and his client, Walter Thompson, had done.”

Since the IRS and our thoroughly conflicted judges whose salaries are paid with IRS receipts take the attitude of Alfonso Bedoya in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” (“We don’t have to show you no stinking law!”) taxpayers who decline to file or pay until such time as the government can show them why they are obliged to obey a law with a specific geographic jurisdiction not including the 50 states -- supposedly authorized by a 16th Amendment which Joe Banister and others contend was never legally ratified -- can expect to continue having their cars and paychecks seized.

“Mr. Banister’s lawyer, Robert Bernhoft, said the verdict was a sign that other taxpayers need not be afraid of confronting the government. ... Mr. Bernhoft said that ‘American citizens have the right to ask the government questions and the government has a duty to answer in good faith,’” The Times reported.

“He added that ‘to proceed against Joe Banister with an indictment rather than simply answering his questions is un-American.’”

“This is going to encourage thousands more people who were on the fence, who were paying taxes only because they were afraid they would be criminally prosecuted,” J.J. MacNab, a Maryland insurance analyst who is writing a book about people who deny the legitimacy of the tax laws and attended the trial, told The Times.

“If too many people do this, the tax system will collapse because it is based on people voluntarily complying” with the law as it has been represented to them.”

###

“Hi Vin, I thought my case might interest you,” writes Steve Murphy of Elko.

“I was arrested for making ‘annoying phone calls’ while trying to collect a civil debt via the telephone, (a) misdemeanor. ... The trial is set for July 19. ... I am defending myself after I learned I had to pay the public defender to defend me. ...

“At my first hearing on June 2, Judge Nethery of Elko Justice Court responded when I asked for a jury trial, ‘No jury trials are allowed in Nevada for misdemeanors.’ ... I filed a Demand For Jury Trial on June 14 based on NRS 175.011. ...”

I take no position on Mr. Murphy’s alleged offense, about which I know nothing. But the statute he cites is interesting. While Section 1 of that statute directs that the default setting in district court is that “cases required to be tried by jury must be so tried unless the defendant waives a jury trial in writing ...” Section 2 of that statute reads: “In a justice’s court, a case must be tried by jury only if the defendant so demands in writing not less than 30 days before trial. ...”“I believe that Elko Justice Court will turn down my motion for a jury trial because ‘That’s the way we do things here’ and that they don’t want the accused demanding jury trials for every petty crime the D.A. comes up with, Mr. Murphy concludes. “It would bankrupt their ‘court system.’ ”

The courts do indeed tend to place their own convenience above the constitutional guarantee of a right to jury trial “in all criminal matters” -- additionally discouraging trials by threatening harsher punishments for those who go to trial. If holding a jury trial for every offense charged meant that the courts would bog down and collapse, so much the better -- police and prosecutors would be forced to pick and choose which laws were truly worth enforcing (since, after all, a law must have 94 percent public support before prosecutors have an even chance of conviction before a randomly selected jury -- a number which can be demonstrated mathematically and which can only be altered by judges lying to jurors and tell them they have “no right to vote their conscience.”)

We’ve got about 20 times too many laws, anyway -- time to tell our hyperactive legislatures to take the rest of their enactments and stuff them.