Northland man says he is unjustly in custody and is not who the State claims

Northland man Jay Maui Wallace claims he is being unlawfully detained at Ngawha Prison because he is not answerable to the State or the courts. Photo / Tania Whyte

A man's claim he is being unlawfully detained in prison because he is "not who overt or covert agents of the State say he is", has been rejected by the Court of Appeal.

Maui Warahi, also known as Jay Maui Wallace, is one of numerous defendants around the country who regularly assert only a corporate version of themselves is answerable to authority – that their physical being should be allowed to walk free.

Wallace is on remand in custody at Northland Region Corrections Facility for charges of breaching a protection order, common assault, threatening to kill, and injuring with intent to injure. He is scheduled to appear in Whangārei District Court on April 27.

Last November he applied unsuccessfully to the High Court for a writ of habeas corpus challenging the legality of his detention. Justice Timothy Brewer rejected the application as invalid, noting Maui failed to allege any specific unlawfulness.

Maui's application to have the Court of Appeal review the High Court's decision was also rejected.

In its recently-released decision, the Appeal Court said it was satisfied Maui had been lawfully detained in accordance with warrants covering periods from last October to March this year, and one issued in relation to the current charges by a judge in Whangārei in February this year.

It was up to Maui to show otherwise.

The dual persona theory Maui relied on was untenable and without legal foundation, the Appeal Court said. Courts have consistently rejected the argument.

Notwithstanding, it was still commonly raised in applications of habeas corpus and in a variety of other legal contexts. Maui has tried to raise it in a number of his past cases, the Appeal Court noted.

In 2016, Wallace made a similar application to the High Court saying his correct name was Abdullah Maui Warahi and that the person described as Jay Maui Wallace was not a legal entity. A judge at that time noted it was Wallace's third application for a writ of habeas corpus with Wallace having also unsuccessfully appealed at least one of them.

In the latest case, the Appeal Court said the belief shared by Wallace and others stems from the Sovereign Citizen movement, an ideology that emerged in the United States in the 1970s.

Proponents believe individuals have two personas – one of flesh and blood, the other a separate legal or "corporate" personality.

They say only that legal or corporate identity is subject to jurisdiction of the state and that their physical being can be disassociated and freed – that the state has no authority over their physical persona.

Maui supported his Appeal Court application with a document he called "Affidavit of Identity".

In it, he stated his name Jay Maui Wallace and any other derivative of it, was a "dead fictitious foreign situs trust or quasi corporation/legal entity not the sovereign soul flesh and blood man that I am".

"That I am a free will flesh and blood suri juris sovereign man and as such I am private, non resident, non domestic, non person, non citizen, non individual and not subject to any real or imaginary statutory acts, rules regulations or quasi laws.

"That I am who I say that I am NOT who the overt or covert agents of the State say that I am.

"That I do not knowingly, willingly, intentionally, or voluntarily surrender my sovereign inalienable rights according to the law of nature."

The state has no legal jurisdiction or sovereign authority over him and it was up to the complainant to bring the correct parties before the courts, Maui said.

The Appeal Court said acts of Parliament, including criminal enactments, were binding on everyone in New Zealand and the Courts of New Zealand must uphold those Acts, the Crimes Act 1961 being one of them.

"The courts have the power to deal with all actions that may amount to criminal offences in this country. Nobody within New Zealand is able to dissociate themselves from their "legal persona" so as to remove themselves from the jurisdiction of the courts," the court said.