Defence of infringement notices for expired warrant, registration, based on ‘pseudolaw’

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

A man caught driving a vehicle that hadn’t had a warrant of fitness or registration for eight years, has tried to divorce himself from the charges with a sovereign citizen theory — one judges have repeatedly warned will never succeed.

Benjamin Te Pairi, 68, was driving in April, 2021, when he was stopped  at a routine checkpoint and issued with infringement notices for his vehicle’s expired warrant of fitness and registration. 

He tried to defend the charges but a community magistrate who first dealt with the case found Te Pairi guilty. He was convicted and fined $700.

Te Pairi appealed to the District Court but the appeal was dismissed by Judge Turitea Bolstad who said there were no grounds for it.

Not content to leave matters there, Te Pairi went to the High Court but was refused leave for a second appeal —  again, because the court said there was no basis for it.

The defence Te Pairi proffered to each court was the same. He didn’t dispute being the driver of the unroadworthy car but claimed the capitalised name on the infringement notices BENJIMAN TE PAIRI was a “fictitious entity” and not him. The tickets therefore, were invalid, he said, and there was no case to answer.

He produced two documents to support his claim. The first was a statutory declaration that he was Benjamin Te Pairi (lower case) a “natural and unenfranchised individual” not to be confused with the fictitious entity referred to in the notices.

The second document was a letter from someone who called themselves the “registrar” of “Te Koti Ateha Rangatira” (said by Te Pairi to have been a court convened by members of his “whanau hapū” under the Te Ture Whenua Māori Act 1993.

The letter reasserted that he wasn’t the person referred to in capital letters on the court documents.  It also said, “the misuse or inappropriate use of any document identifying him in lower case or otherwise will not be tolerated, and if so will be dealt with in Te Koti Ateha Rangatira”.

In a recently released decision as to why he refused leave for an appeal, Justice Andru Isac said the arguments advanced by Te Pairi were untenable and lacking any legal foundation. 

The arguments were firmly grounded in sovereign citizen “dual personality” or “split-person” theories. Such theories were sometimes referred to as “pseudolaw”  — a collection of legal-sounding but false rules that purport to be law.

Pseudolaw tried to mirror and use the language, forms and structures of legal reasoning, but lacked the substantive engagement with the core norms, principles and methods of legal reasoning, Justice Isac said.

Dual personality theories essentially contended that people had two separate and distinct entities —  a natural or corporeal form and a fictitious, legal personality. The law only applied to the latter, and could not bind the former.

However, theories like the one Te Pairi advanced had been “consistently rejected by the courts as a nonsense, utterly lacking any legal foundation”,  Justice Isac said.

He noted the courts had also consistently rejected arguments asserting the existence of a separate Māori sovereignty or Māori legal system.

Te Ture Whenua Maori Act was intended for matters relating to land,  not as a means to enforce criminal law. It therefore followed that it had no application to driving offences or infringement notices, the judge said.

“The licensing and registration of drivers and their vehicles on public roads are matters dealt with by the Land Transport Act 1998, under which Te Pairi was prosecuted and (quite properly) convicted,” the judge said.

Acts of Parliament, including criminal enactments, were binding on everyone in New Zealand and the Courts must uphold those Acts, he said.

“No person within New Zealand is able to dissociate themselves from their “legal persona” so as to remove themselves from the jurisdiction of the courts.