The Montana Freemen were an anti-government militant Christian Patriot group based outside the town of Jordan, Montana, United States. The members of the group referred to their land as "Justus Township" and had declared their leaders and followers "sovereign citizens" no longer under the authority of any outside government. They became the center of public attention in 1996 when they engaged in a prolonged armed standoff with agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Philosophy The Montana Freemen, who were direct ideological descendants of the Posse Comitatus movement, espoused the doctrine of individual sovereignty and based on this belief, they rejected the authority of the federal government of the United States. On March 2, 1995, William Stanton, a Garfield County rancher, became the first Montana resident ever to be convicted of terrorism; District Judge Kenneth Wilson sentenced Stanton to 10 years in prison (the maximum penalty) for using violence for political ends. The following day, four armed men who styled themselves the "Garfield County Freemen" were arrested when they entered the Musselshell County Courthouse and tried to file papers protesting the seizure of Rodney Skurdal's house by the Internal Revenue Service. Liens The Freemen, led by LeRoy M. Schweitzer, used inter alia Anderson on the Uniform Commercial Code and Bankers Handbook to draw notices of lien against public officials. The liens were then allegedly sold to generate equity to fund an effort to make a "firm offer to pay off the national debt." The Freemen claimed that the liens conformed to the Uniform Commercial Code and that their township's court had an interest in a tort claim for damages incurred by the named public officials for violations of their oaths of office. They also claimed that support of the corporate credit system was an unconstitutional and corrupt act which has throughout the last half of the twentieth century "...[deprived the majority of Americans] of their property until [their] posterity wakes up homeless...", a paraphrased quotation attributed to Thomas Jefferson. Bank fraud The Freemen were known to produce their own very realistic counterfeit checks and money orders, sometimes ordering items and deliberately overpaying so they could demand refunds. The president of one bank reported that over an 18-month period his bank received two to five complaints a week about Freemen checks. In 1995, members wrote a fraudulent check to try to purchase $1.4 million worth of firearms, ammunition, and bulletproof