William A. Cohan has over 70 reported decisions - primarily involving criminal and civil tax and securities and business controversies - and each one provides development and application of legal principles and laws of our nation. A reported decision constitutes case law. Reported decisions of appeals courts and other courts applying the law constitute precedents. These interpretations are distinguished from "statutory law" which are comprised of statutes and codes (laws) - the general rules - enacted by legislative bodies, "regulatory law," i.e. regulations promulgated by agencies based on statutes, and in some cases, the Common Law, which is based on generally accepted principles of decisions from England and our own courts. The rulings in trials and hearings which are not appealed are not precedent. A reported decision includes an opinion applying legal rules (authority) to particular facts, providing guidance for the future on the same legal or similar questions.

Our cases creating reported decisions reflect the firm's impact on the laws of our nation and our commitment to creative interpretations of legal principles. Many of our clients have been victimized by overzealous law enforcement, for example, unreasonable interpretations of tax and/or securities laws, excessive use of force, retaliatory prosecution for exercise of the right to free speech and free association critical of our government and its foreign and domestic policies, elected and appointed officials, and current policies and/or laws. We are among the very few aggressive firms in the nation defending the rights of people victimized by lawless law enforcement. We prosecute violations of our clients' rights by holding law enforcement accountable to the true standards and ideals of the Constitution, and we do not bend to the whims of current majority interpretations of the Constitution that sacrifice our individual freedoms in the guise of the War Against Terror, the War Against Drugs, or any other supposed enemies either foreign or domestic.

In 1989 - after an unsuccessful trip to the U.S. Supreme Court seeking dismissal of criminal tax charges based on outrageous prosecutorial misconduct - we obtained the acquittal of Bill Kilpatrick on all 25 felony tax charges against him - totaling more than $120 million. Since then we've obtained acquittals of more than twenty individuals on nearly 200 felony charges in six complex multi-defendant criminal tax cases and handled more than 300 lawsuits.

Link To: Kilpatrick Opinion

Grandbouche v. Adams, In re First National Bank of Englewood, Voss v. Bersgaard and Pleasant v. Lovell-- all address the balance between the government's power to investigate potential criminal activity and citizens' rights individually and collectively to challenge government action to seek changes in laws and policies free from fear of retaliation by those whose power is threatened with curtailment and whose activities are criticized. The recent decision (10/4/04) in Allen et al v. United States by the federal court in Las Vegas, NV, stripping a federal prosecutor and various federal and state law enforcement agents of their qualified immunity, followed by dismissals of their appeals (3/14/05), dramatically demonstrates how the constitution can provide protection from lawless law enforcement -- but only if lawsuits are timely filed to protect constitutional rights.

In Grandbouche v. Adams, 529 F. Supp. 545 (D. Colo. 1982) we filed the first lawsuit which established the right to sue IRS agents for conspiring to violate the first amendment rights to freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, and the right to petition for redress of grievances-- and to do so anonymously in order to criticize the IRS, or any agent, agency or officer of government-- without fear of retaliation.

Only a year later we successfully resisted the unlawful disclosure of the membership list of an organization seeking (among other things) to abolish the individual income tax and re-establish gold and silver as the basis for our monetary system. (In re 1st National Bank of Englewood, 701 F. 2d 115 [10th Cir. 1983])

Two years after 1st National Bank of Englewood was decided the IRS raided the offices of the National Commodity and Barter Association (NCBA). Immediately thereafter we successfully sued and established that the IRS searches and seizures violated the same principles articulated in Grandbouche v. Adams and 1st National Bank of Englewood.

Grandbouche v. Adams was filed in federal court in Denver, CO, in 1980 on behalf of the late John E. Grandbouche and the organization he founded, the "National Commodity and Barter Association" (NCBA). Grandbouche was a candidate for governor of Colorado who advocated abolishing the individual income tax, increasing protection for personal and financial privacy, and eliminating the Federal Reserve System by reinstating gold and silver backing for United States currency. Within two years of forming NCBA, Grandbouche had attracted thousands of members, including several IRS undercover agents and informants, most notably one Pauline Adams. Ms. Adams, who had used numerous aliases, was a convicted felon (with at least a half dozen additional convictions for triggering false fire alarms, along with assault with a deadly weapon, holding a Colorado State Trooper at gun point, etc.) Adams had worked as an undercover agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms ("BATF") prior to her employment by the IRS to infiltrate NCBA and purloin membership lists and other confidential information. BATF notified the IRS of Ms. Adams' prior criminal convictions, her demonstrated propensity to fabricate entire incidents and her history of twenty-five (25) electro - shock treatments at the Colorado State Mental Hospital. Some of the details of Ms. Adams' activities are reported in Pleasant v. Lovell, 876 F. 2d 787 (10th Cir. 1989) a companion case to Grandbouche v. Adams, in which the Court of Appeals rejected the "qualified immunity" defenses of the IRS agents who directed Ms. Adams' activities, finding that the agents violated the NCBA members' rights protected by the First and Fourth Amendments, including the right to anonymity as members of an organization advocating abolition of the individual income tax.

That particular right of NCBA's members-- and all people in the United States--had been discussed in another federal case brought by John Grandbouche's successor as director of NCBA, John Voss: Voss v. Bersgaard, 774 F. 2d 402 (10th Cir. 1985), discussed below, a case in which the Court of Appeals found the IRS had violated NCBA members' right to anonymity in an illegal raid by gun wielding IRS agents. Just as the IRS had violated NCBA's members' rights to anonymity via Pauline Adams' repeated surreptitious thefts of membership lists and other confidential information during 1979 and 1980, the United States Attorney's office had utilized grand jury subpoenas to illegally obtain NCBA membership information in 1981 and 1982, culminating in another decision by the Court of Appeals, In re First National Bank of Englewood, Colorado, 701 F. 2d 115 (10th Cir. 1983), again concluding that the government had violated the First Amendment rights of NCBA's members.

Despite the clear condemnation of the IRS's conduct by the federal courts in 1982 and 1983, the IRS raided NCBA headquarters in Denver and satellite offices in Minnesota, Iowa, South Dakota, Washington, and California in 1985. The United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit affirmed the District Court's Decision that found the IRS raids illegal and, in particular, violations of the same first amendment rights determined in Grandbouche v. Adams and In Re First National Bank of Englewood, CO.

On May 29, 2003, more than 50 helmeted, flak jacketed IRS, FBI and North Las Vegas SWAT team agents attacked 3 business offices of a building contractor in Las Vegas, Nevada. Two dozen unarmed office workers were illegally arrested at gunpoint, illegally handcuffed and interrogated in 106 degree heat without shade or water. There has been no press coverage of these events. All of the business records, the computers and the payroll were seized, even though the agents had no arrest warrants, no right to seize the payroll and no right to arrest, detain, interrogate or point loaded sub-machine guns at any of these 24 people. Surveillance cameras installed at the main business office were destroyed by the agents, but a few thousand photographs of their rampage were retrieved from the hard drive of one computer the agents destroyed, but left behind. We filed a civil rights lawsuit against those who conducted these military style assaults and the federal prosecutor who planned and directed them.

After the prosecutor and the lead IRS agent were stripped of their immunity, they filed criminal tax charges against eleven of the assault victims, including the sister, brother and nephew of the "target" of the investigation, as well as his wife and his mother. The criminal tax cases and the civil rights cases are currently pending (February, 2011) in the federal district court in Las Vegas, Nevada, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. 

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