Snipes conviction could deter tax-rejection wingnuts

Movie star Wesley Snipes, not just a figurehead but an active player in the antitax movement, has been sentenced for tax nonpayment. His sentence, after a criminal trial in regular federal court rather civil tax court, is a three-year sentence, likely to be served on supervised release.

Snipes had a monetary surprise for the government at his sentencing (see below), but no philosophical remorse.

Snipes hadn’t submitted a tax return since 1998, and had engaged the services of codefendants Douglas P. Rosile and Eddie Ray Kahn.

Kahn was the founder of American Rights Litigators, and a successor group, Guiding Light of God Ministries, that purported to help members legally avoid paying taxes. Snipes was a dues-paying member of the organization, and Rosile, a de-licensed accountant, prepared Snipes' paperwork.

The actor maintained in a years-long battle with the IRS he did not have to pay taxes, using fringe arguments common to “tax protesters” who say the government has no legal right to collect. After joining Kahn's group, the government said, Snipes instructed his employees to stop paying their own taxes and sought $11 million in 1996 and 1997 taxes he legally paid.

Obvious proof of nutbarrery? Combining antitaxism with “God.”

The government claims Snipes owes at least $2.7 million in back taxes just from three years that were in question at the trial.

As for his attorney’s complaints about both the length of Snipes’ sentence and the selective prosecution of not going after any other Kahn clients, Judge William Terrell Hodges admitted as such on both counts. He said Snipes’ decade-long history was “serious” and that the selective prosecution was about “deterrence.”

Snipes had three checks totaling $5 mil ready to give the government at the Ocala, Fla., courthouse. But, even after his conviction, in a prepared statement, he refused to use the word “taxes.”

Hey, Wesley, way to prove Judge Hodges right after you’ve been convicted.

Snipes was acquitted on tax fraud and conspiracy charges, which some antitaxers are already hailing as a “victory.” (Wonder if Ron Paul visited Ocala recently?)

I can see beating the fraud charges, as, if you don’t submit any paperwork, there’s nothing to hang a fraud charge on. But the conspiracy charge, especially after telling his employees to not pay up? Beating that rap, I don’t get.