More thoughts on the Jeffs verdict, polygamy and child abuse.

I would like to clarify something regarding the last post I put up regarding the conviction of Warren Jeffs as an accessory to rape, as well as several others (notably the post I did on the Lost Boys of Colorado City and Hildale) in which I've been quite critical of Jeffs and the FLDS Church (which I will again mention has nothing at all to do with and has been completely disavowed by the mainline LDS Church, of which I am a member and which banned polygamy over a century ago.)

One of the jurors who served on the Jeffs jury (identified in today's Arizona Republic as Jerry Munk) summed it up best when asked about the defense argument that the victim, Elissa Walls, never cried rape or talked to her family members about her experience or feelings about it while it was happening.

"She was fourteen," Munk said. "She didn't have to say anything for a rape to occur."

Exactly. And I will even say that I think that Utah's law, which grants a three year near-age exemption in the case of underage children makes a heck of a lot of sense, especially when compared, for example, to the Georgia law that is responsible for Genarlow Wilson continuing to sit in prison and rot and then register as a sex offender for having consensual teenage sex with another student at the high school he went to.

I've always said that I don't care what goes on between consenting adults. My problem with FLDS is that they are responsible for a great deal of evil in the lives of their own children, forcing teenage girls to be raped and abandoning teenage boys to make their way in the world with practically no preparation or knowledge about how to survive in it.

Polygamists, including FLDS are free to practice their religion. But they can let their children wait until adulthood to be able to make adult decisions. To be honest, I've never thought that polygamy itself should be a crime (especially since it leads to many grey areas, with the worsening economy making it more and more common for more than two unrelated adults to live together, with or without any of them having a formal marriage; are they going to make it a crime only if some of them are having more than a monogamous relationship within the household? And how do they determine that?) For that matter, many people, including muslims (1/5 of the world's population) belong to religions which allow the practice of polygamy. If a muslim man with three wives were to come to America from someplace else, are his wives no longer married to him? According to our own laws, they can't all be, but likely he has a valid marriage certificate for each of them from whatever country they were married in.

This case is not, however, about freedom of religion. It's about a crime involving children. There are already legitimate examples of where laws do limit what churches can do. For example, if a church believed in human sacrifice the person who carried it out and those who helped them could still be held liable for murder (for example, Sara Maria Aldrete, who was the high priestess of a bizarre cult located in Matamoros, Mexico and who is known to have murdered several people in ritual sacrifices including a University of Texas student named Mark Kilroy who was kidnapped for the purpose.

However, I know of no doctrine within polygamous religions which mandate that children younger than eighteen must be married. They can wait until eighteen. At that, I would point out that eighteen is indeed an arbitrary number-- I've certainly known some fourteen year olds who probably knew more about sex and its consequences than a lot of older adults, and I've also known thirty year olds who are remarkably ignorant about it (likely that group also includes many FLDS-raised men, who were cast out as Lost Boys in order to unbalance the gender ratio for the benefit of polygamists, years ago with no social skills at all, having never been permitted to talk to a female other than their mothers and still survive just on the edges of society). But since there is no test for maturity, we as a society have set eighteen years old as the age at which we consider a person to be an adult. So at the very least, I hope that the FLDS realizes from yesterday's verdict that children at least must be protected and nurtured, and with that perhaps even educated so that they can make their own decisions or survive in the world outside of the confines of the border straddling community.

One can hope that, anyway. Though knowing what I do about FLDS (which is more than many people know) my belief is that they will consider it an act of persecution by the outside world and maybe even a step towards the apocalypse.

Warren Jeffs convicted.

Breaking news: The jury up in St. George has convicted FLDS leader Warren Jeffs of being an accessory to rape. Justice has been served in the case of Elissa Walls, who at the age of fourteen was forced into a marriage with her nineteen year old cousin by Warren Jeffs.

I don't expect that despite the conviction the FLDS will just disband and go away, and we have to keep in mind that it remains as it always has been, a very closed and tight-knit community. However, this is nevertheless a victory for justice, and it sends a clear message that whatever the polygamists do (and I've said many times that I don't care what kind of relationship consenting adults have, including polygamous ones), that children should be left alone and allowed to make their own decisions.

Warren Jeffs Trial

I wrote last year upon the occasion of the arrest of Warren Jeffs, the leader of the FLDS polygamist cult,

So Warren Jeffs has presided over a community in which 13 year old girls are raped, and 13 year old boys are dumped on the street with nothing and told not to come back....

Over the past three years, under the leadership of Arizona authorities, primarily Attorney General Terry Goddard, along with authorities in Utah, progress has been made in gaining control over the group. The resources of the church (which includes all the polygamist homes-- none of the people who live in them actually own their building) have been ordered by a judge to be controlled by a group of outside trustees for the benefit of the community and individuals within it. Where crimes are discovered, they have been prosecuted, and in particular Jeffs will now be prosecuted.

And that will hopefully be the beginning of the end for this nightmare of what amounts to sexual slavery, or of exile, for the children of Colorado City and Hildale.

As I've said many times, I don't care what any consenting adult does with any other consenting adult, but in this case, there is much justice that needs to, and I hope will, be served in our court system.

Jeffs is specifically being tried in St. George for his role in forcing a then-fourteen year old girl to marry her cousin. Today his defense got their turn and tried to undermine the testimony of the victim (who is now 21 and has fled the church) by getting her to say she never cried 'rape.' In fact, her case is somewhat unusual in that she was actually her cousin's first wife, and her cousin was 19 at the time, while some young girls have had to marry men as old as in their sixties and become plural wives.

WHAT?! That's supposed to be a defense? How likely is it that a fourteen year old, who has been told by someone who she believes is a prophet of God (Jeffs) that she will be eternally damned if she does not go along with it, will scream 'rape' when she is being ravaged by someone who as far as she knows is her lawful husband? I'd like to ask whether any female children growing up in Colorado City or Hildale were ever advised to scream, 'rape' if they were married against their will.

Warren Jeffs is simply put a man who has done a great deal of harm to the young people in his community. Two years ago, I blogged on The Real Lost Boys: And it's Usually Not a Happy Ending about the young teenage men of Colorado City and Hildale who are dumped out into the world possessing rudimentary construction skills, zero social skills and in many cases have never read any book other than the Bible or the Book of Mormon. Many of them end up in prison, on drugs or dead, while others live on the fringes of society in small groups all over southern Utah looking for whatever work they can find.

And the Lost Boys continue to be an overlooked issue (though last year Jeffs and his associates settled a civil suit filed by six of them). However this trial is focused on what happened to the girls.

And that is just as ugly, if not uglier than what he has done to the boys. Young girls forced to marry, often to men old enough to be their father (and then being their fourth or fifth wife at that.) They are raped, and forced to obey, with the knowledge that they will be beaten if they do not (and with the always present admonition from Jeffs that damnation awaits them if they don't obey.) Then later they have to raise their own daughters to a similar fate, and pray that their sons are among the lucky few who get to stay.

I hope that this prosecution is successful. Deconstructing the web of lies, bondage and misery that is at the core of FLDS will take time, but a successful prosecution of Warren Jeffs will be a giant step in that direction.

Most police do the best job they can and do it well

Last week I wrote a post on the two boys recovered from a kidnapper in Missouri. And as was confirmed today, the man who held at least one of the boys for four years was a child molester.

In the post I wrote, Kudos to the police officers who noticed a rusty white pickup truck with a camper shell like that used in the kidnapping while they were visiting the building where it was parked on an unrelated case.

This is a sterling example of police work done right. So was the arrest of Warren Jeffs last August in which a police officer on a routine traffic stop sensed that the man in the back seat was unreasonably nervous and couldn't give a straight answer. Jeffs is now on trial and hopefully the nightmare of young girls being forced to marry old men and become their fifth wife, or of teenage boys being dumped out on the street without being ready to meet the world will now come to an end.

I've also been critical of police at times. For example, in this post about a kid being killed after a taser was used unnecessarily or in the post where I wrote about my experience serving on a Grand Jury in which I wrote, in part:

Observation #4: A few police officers will cut corners (not what you want when you are deciding on matters that affect people's lives). On one occasion, we heard from a police officer who mentioned a person's prior criminal record and the representative from the county attorney's office had to advise the jury to ignore that comment and told the police officer he shouldn't mention that. So five minutes after that case ended, we had the same police officer back on the stand in regard to another case involving someone else, and he did exactly the same thing (and got the same warning.) He should know the law on this, and the first time could have been an honest mistake but I really felt the second time was intentional. Now, the evidence was easily sufficient even without that, so I have to question what his motives were. There were also cases in which the investigation seemed to be particularly slipshod, with even basic information either not collected or not put into the report, which is unfair to the cop testifying when he has to look in the report and can't find the answer to a question such as 'how tall is this person' or 'did someone verify that the item this person had was the one stolen?' I have a lot of friends who are police officers, and I believe that most of them act honorably and do the best job they can, and certainly deserve respect and support (support meaning better equipment and higher pay-- our cops are underfunded by our misers down in Phoenix as well) for the dangerous and thankless job they do. But I'm also convinced that there are some of the other kind out there, and we saw both types testify.

And we have seen a number of high profile cases out of large cities like Los Angeles, New Orleans (particularly during Katrina) and New York where individual or small groups of police officers have become the criminals themselves. In cases like the Abner Louima case, we have certainly seen how a criminal in a uniform is just that much more dangerous.

I had an experience myself with what might be considered a police excess (though certainly not on the scale of what we have seen in some minority communities). In 1995 I was involved in a traffic accident in Albuquerque. While I was waiting for an ambulance to take me to the hospital and make sure I was OK, I could hear distinctly a police officer rifling through my car (without a warrant). I couldn't see it because I was restrained by the paramedics and couldn't turn my neck. Later when I visited my car at the yard where it had been towed to I could see that what I had heard was correct, the glove box and other things had been opened and dumped out (which the accident did not cause that) and a locked briefcase I had was forced open-- which did bother me because the briefcase had belonged to my late father and was one of the very few things I had which had been his.) I don't know what they were looking for-- probably drugs, but I don't use drugs and whatever they were looking for they didn't find it. The long term harm to the police is that (at least speaking for myself) if I were serving on a jury and a defendant's lawyer were to suggest that the police broke the law and violated his or her civil rights, I would tend to take that suggestion much more seriously as a possibility than I probably would have before that episode. And when I read about charges like that in the media I tend to consider that it may well be true (so for example, I believe that Mark Furman might (or might not) have planted evidence in the O.J. case, which most people I've asked are sure that he did not-- although they don't say why they are sure, they just are).

I do believe that it is important that the public have full confidence in the police, both that they will protect their communities and that they will obey the law in regard to treatment of suspects and procedures in exercising their authority. Where failures to carry out these duties are found, then we should not be afraid as a society to prosecute police officers just as we would anyone else who committed a crime.

However, I also believe that police get the bad end of the old adage that if you do 99 things right and make one mistake then you will get hanged for the mistake. Police officers have a tough, tough job (one that can get them killed)-- and most often they do get the bad guys and don't bother the good guys-- but they are held up to a theoretical standard of perfection. Yes, we've all met the 'badge and a gun' kind of cop who likes to harrass people just to feel big, but the truth is that most police departments don't want to hire people like that, both for reasons of public opinion and for reasons of liability (people can still sue in the civil courts if they want to-- and it usually is the department that they sue, not just the individual officer.) Yes, some investigations are slipshod and sometimes police don't follow up leads because they are either oveworked or just plain too lazy to look beyond the first suspect they can think of (remember Richard Jewell-- who ironically is a good cop). But the large majority of police officers (and some of them are my friends) are good people who will go out of their way to do their jobs, which also includes helping people if they need it. My son in law wants to go to the police academy. I am tremendously proud of how good a husband he has been to my daughter (working two jobs night and day to put food on the table) and a father to my grandchildren. I am sure that he would be a good cop if he does go through the training for it (right now he is a prison guard-- another dangerous job that doesn't pay enough.) Most of the police officers I know in the little town where I live (a lot of them live there) are good people. My kids go to school with their kids, and I see them around town all the time. I'm sure they are not so friendly to people who they arrest, but let's face it-- would you prefer that they not do it? Some cases are very tough for police, such as if they get called to a domestic dispute at midnight, but they still have to go and if necessary may have to arrest people and drag them out of their own homes. It's what the law says they should do and we expect them to follow the law-- but the people they arrest will probably tell it much differently. In rural communities it may even be harder on the police because of how often they end up having to arrest people who they know, or sometimes even people who they are related to.