"The hard fact is that intelligent people, even very intelligent people, can believe baffling things."

That spot-on observation comes from Judge Jeffery Sutton of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, who just penned a remarkable opinion that tackles thorny questions of mental illness, personal responsibility and the right to be represented by counsel—not to mention how to steal $31 million with a few clicks of a mouse. 

If Lit Daily gave awards for judicial writing (maybe we should?) this one would be a shoo-in for honors. 

It focuses on an appeal by Randall Beane, who is serving 155 months behind bars for wire and bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Writing for the unanimous panel, Sutton begins by noting that for years, Beane "honorably worked for our country, serving as an Air Force electrical engineer." But after he fell into debt, he came across a video by someone calling himself Harvey Dent (presumably a tribute to the Batman villain).

Dent espouses the so-called strawman conspiracy theory. That is, the Federal Reserve has created secret accounts for every citizen that hold in trust that citizen's inherent "unlimited value." Or something along those lines, it's not totally clear.

It sounds wacky, right?

YouTube has removed Dent's videos, but I found the first segment easily enough. Dent appears to lay out a simple way to use your Social Security number and a Federal Reserve routing number to access seemingly unlimited funds. It seems so easy there's no way it should work. 

Except it did.

One night, Beane followed the video's instructions and successfully transferred money to pay off his personal loans, his credit card debt, and his car insurance. Two nights later, Beane did it again, this time buying certificates of deposit. 

"He didn't stop until his computer's mouse ran out of battery charge," Sutton wrote. "Then he went to bed. Beane awoke the next morning to find over $28 million worth of CDs in his bank account. Before long, he increased the total to $31 million. And before long, he started cashing the CDs. With his debt cleared up and plenty of cash now on hand, he bought an $86,000 truck as well as a half-million-dollar motor home that had two bathrooms, marble floors, and a fireplace."

Seriously, how is there any money left in the Fed if it's this easy to take? I only hope some  IT person has since shut the loophole down. I also get the sense that if Beane hadn't been so greedy, he'd have gotten away with it.

But back to Sutton's narrative. "Suspicious of his sudden fortune, one of Beane's banks froze his account. It also attempted to cancel the payments he made on his new truck and motor home."

But then Bean's co-defendant, Heather Ann Tucci-Jarraf, intervened. A former lawyer who'd once been prosecutor and public defender, she'd become a strawman theory proponent. 

"Claiming to be Beane's lawyer, she made phone calls to one of the banks and a dealership to persuade them that he rightfully owned the money he was spending. Her assurances worked, and the bank stopped cancelling the payments."

(Me banging head on desk.)

The pair did eventually get caught though. Federal officers stormed the RV dealer just as Beane was about to drive off into the sunset. 

"Beane and Tucci-Jarraf responded to their arrests with a flood of frivolous motions," wrote Sutton, who was a partner at Jones Day and State Solicitor of the State of Ohio before he was appointed to the bench in 2003 by President George W. Bush. 

"They demanded hearings on their own identities, the identities of the arresting officers, and the identity of the presiding judge. They asserted that United States courts cannot hold anyone 'except by their own consent' and that the United States (a tad more plausibly) is a 'bankrupt corporation.' They submitted hundreds of pages of pointless Uniform Commercial Code filings, allegedly related to something called 'The One People's Public Trust.' They mailed the court an itemized bill seeking payment of over $46 quintillion dollars. On and on it went. Concerned that such conduct might confuse a jury, the judge granted a motion in limine that barred the defendants from raising similar arguments at trial."

They also asked to represent themselves at trial, rejecting their court-appointed defenders–though they did request stand-by counsel.

In what should come as a surprise to absolutely no one, the pro se pair were convicted of all charges.

On appeal (where they were represented by actual lawyers), both challenged their convictions, arguing that the lower court judge should have found they were not competent to represent themselves.

Sutton was not persuaded—and as interesting as the facts of the case might be, this is the real meat of the opinion. 

Beane argued that the federal magistrate judge in Tennessee should have known he wasn't competent the moment he was sworn in at his pretrial Faretta hearing to waive his right to counsel. At the hearing, Beane offered his own oath: "Standing due identification correction, I am source of all that is, original nunc pro tunc, praeterea, pre terea, and I do swear to speak only true, accurate, and complete."

"The source of all that is?" queried the judge. "Was he the source of the sun and moon?" he asked. What about a box of Kleenex?

"I am source of all that is," Beane insisted eight times before reluctantly agreeing to use the conventional oath. 

His lawyers—four third-year law students at the University of Virginia School of Law, supervised by Professor Stephen Braga, director of the Appellate Litigation Clinic— argued that Beane's appeal "is about the catastrophic consequences of letting a man subject to such beliefs defend himself in a high stakes criminal trial where decades of imprisonment were on the line."

But Sutton, who was joined by judges Deborah Cook and Amul Thapar, wrote that the trial judge had no duty to save the defendants from themselves.

 "The right to waive counsel includes the right to waive effective counsel," Sutton wrote. "The self-lawyer thus is free to behave as the eccentric his client selected, and that is no concern of the Sixth Amendment."

The only question is, did the defendants expressly waive the right to counsel in a knowing and intelligent manner? And did they have the mental competence to quarterback their own defense?

Here, Sutton said it wasn't a close call.

Yes, both defendants "gave odd answers to straightforward questions" at their Faretta hearings. But Sutton also noted that they "never gave the judge adequate cause to fear for their mental competence. At all stages of the proceedings they stuck to the prescribed rules, interacted courteously with the court and prosecution, and collaborated effectively with their appointed standby counsel. The government, notably, had to raise only a few objections at trial, all relatively minor. And on the rare occasion when the judge provided instruction, they heeded it without protest."

He added, "Sure, experienced counsel would have done a better job. But that reality doesn't show the defendants were too incompetent to defend themselves. Else, laypeople could never represent themselves."

But shouldn't their "idiosyncratic actions and unconventional beliefs" provide proof that they were of unsound mind? 

"For its part, the Supreme Court has never suggested that eccentric worldviews, standing alone, establish mental incompetence," Sutton wrote. 

Membership in our democracy comes with "a view of the dignity of individuals to make weighty decisions for themselves," he continued. "That's why they may reject life-saving healthcare, consent to incriminating searches, conduct their own criminal defense as they see fit, and—perhaps most harmful but rational all the same—confess to the commission of a crime."

"Exercising these rights sometimes costs individuals more than they ever could stand to gain," he added. "But the Constitution lets American citizens learn that lesson the hard way."