SALT LAKE CITY (Reuters) – The Utah Supreme Court on Tuesday tossed out the 2007 sexual abuse conviction of polygamist leader Warren Jeffs and ordered a new trial on charges of forcing a 14-year-old girl to marry her first cousin.
Jeffs, the self-proclaimed prophet of a breakaway Mormon sect, was sentenced in November 2007 to a term of 10 years to life in prison for two felony convictions on charges he was an accomplice to rape.
But the Utah high court ruled that the trial judge had erred in giving instructions to the jury.
Jeffs, revered as infallible by his followers but reviled as power-crazed and delusional by others, will remain in prison for now, though his lawyers are expected to seek his release.
Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff said he was very disappointed with the court decision.
"One of our biggest concerns obviously is how do we protect young girls, particularly within closed societies, polygamist sects, from being forced by their leaders to marry older men and have sex with them," he said at a news conference.
Warren Jeffs did what his predecessors did, including his father Rulon who had something like 20 wives and 60 kids at the time of his death.
The politics and politicians in Utah are still tightly controlled by the LDS church, and since the FLDS church is essentially "excommunicated" from the mainstream church, there is plenty of political will to go after these pedophiles.
Almost as significant as compelling barely pubescent girls to be wedded to some scumbag she doesn't even know, or knows superficially, people like Jeffs routinely bilk their respective states for welfare money. This was the case with Tom Green, back in 2002 or thereabouts.
Since a polygamist man marries more than one woman, from a legal perspective babies born of the 2nd and succeeding wives are considered "welfare babies", for lack of a better term. She collects the money, gives it to him, and that's very often how the large family stays solvent.
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