A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit from a group that held a nine-hour standoff with Massachusetts police on a highway last summer while traveling to Maine.
Members of the Rhode Island-based Moorish Militia, formerly known as Rise of the Moors, filed a lawsuit in September against the Commonwealth of Massachusetts claiming that their Second Amendment rights had been infringed upon and that they had been falsely arrested and imprisoned while driving to the Bangor area.
Militia leader Jamhal Latimer, who prefers the name Jamhal Talib Abdullah Bey, said that Massachusetts’ strict gun laws impeded his and his fellow Moors’ ability to defend Maine and other northern states from domestic terrorism or a foreign invasion.
Judge Indira Talwani of U.S. District Court in Boston dismissed that case on March 4, citing case law that prevents federal courts from infringing upon state courts’ ability to prosecute defendants.
“Here, the [federal] court would ‘needlessly inject’ itself in pending state proceedings if it were to consider Plaintiffs’ objections to the legality of their detention and criminal prosecutions against them,” Talwani said. “The court has no reason to believe that Plaintiffs will not have an opportunity to raise all pertinent issues within the state court system, whether in front of the trial court or on appeal.”
Eleven members of the Moorish Militia have been in jail in Massachusetts since July, when state police arrested them on I-95 near Wakefield for illegal possession of firearms and large-capacity firearms, improper storage and conspiracy to improperly store firearms, providing false information to police and wearing body armor during the commission of a felony.
The militia members had been traveling in two cars with unregistered Maine license plates to the Bangor area for “training” when they stopped on the side of the highway to refill their cars with gas around 1 a.m. on July 3.
Troopers pulled over to assist them, noticed their body armor and discovered that their registrations were false and that none of them had drivers’ licenses or licenses to carry firearms.
Nine men fled into nearby woods after officers arrested two of them, prompting police to temporarily shut down the highway and issue shelter-in-place orders for nearby communities until they arrested the rest of the group.
Moorish Militia members have never elaborated on what their training entailed or where exactly in the Bangor area they were heading. No members have any registered property under their names in Maine.
The Moorish Militia is part of the Moorish sovereign citizen movement, a loose collection of adherents who believe that Black Americans are indigenous to North America but are exempt from U.S. laws and only subject to an obscure 1787 treaty between the U.S. and Morocco.
Moorish sovereign citizens have made headlines in recent years for filing court cases to justify seizing others’ homes and filing fake liens against public officials.
