Posted on 05/01/2008 4:44:54 PM PDT by Politicalmom
SAN ANTONIO — A judge ordered that the baby boy born to a girl taken from a polygamist sect's ranch in West Texas be placed in state custody, according to documents released Thursday.
Texas District Judge Barbara Walther signed the order Wednesday giving the state custody of the 1-day-old infant born to a teen believed to be 15 or 16 years old.
The girl has claimed to be 18, according to an affidavit signed by Ruby Gutierrez, a Child Protective Services caseworker, but officials believe she is younger and placed her in foster care with other children taken from the ranch.
The newborn is the teen's second child; the first is a 20-month-old boy. The father of both children was identified as Jackson Jessop, 22, but state officials say they don't know his whereabouts.
Child welfare officials now have 464 children in their custody, swept from the Yearning For Zion Ranch in Eldorado because authorities believe underage girls were forced into marriages and sex with older men. Authorities are also now investigating possible sexual abuse of boys.
Church members have vehemently denied there was any abuse, and civil liberties groups have raised concerns at the sweeping nature of the removals.
Individual custody hearings are set to be completed by June 5.
CPS and law enforcement raided the ranch on April 3 after a girl who was purportedly 16 called a domestic abuse hotline to complain of abuse at the hands her much older husband. Authorities are investigating whether the calls were a hoax.
Regardless, child welfare authorities say 31 of the 53 girls aged 14-17 have children or are pregnant.
Under Texas law, children under the age of 17 generally cannot consent to sex with an adult. A girl can get married with parental permission at 16, but the girls who belong to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints are not believed to have legal marriages.
FLDS is a breakaway sect of the mainline Mormon church, which disavowed polygamy a century ago.
ROTFL!
Location and types of bone fractures are more telling than numbers.
Again, exhume the bodies and search for abuse. If there is probable cause, this shouldn’t be to hard to get a warrant for.
When you have a closed sect (I don’t believe they get a whole lot of converts - perhaps I’m wrong, but they tend to shun the outside world) you wind up with a very small gene pool. One of the side effects of a small gene pool is deformities and infant deaths. Frankly, I’m kind of surprised we haven’t heard of hemophilia in the males.
LOL...how did the culture survive prior to the world wide web (thank you AlGore...)
But while it doesn't say that the baby was separated from the mother, it doesn't say it wasn't either. It certainly can be read to imply that the baby was taken.
The legal commentators at Findlaw.com (hardly friends of the government) Disagree with your assessment of the legality and procedures followed by the government in this case. If there is no support for your position there you can bet there will not be any in the courts.
I guess they would have found other things to do with that one hand.
A court of law in this case is not needed to prove the guilt of the cult for all the accusations against them
No, no, no, no, no. This is America. We have a system. Ted Bundy got a trial. Charles Manson got a trial. Each and every man and woman in this case deserves their own, personal trial.
What you are hoping for is a technicality -not justice- to set the evil men and women free of the ability to be punished for their “most well known” crimes.”
What I am hoping is that the courts will be prevented from expanding the definition of child abuse to include something a parent might do, because of their association through choice or through birth with a particular group.
Prayer for the healing of your family.
Now that should be simple:
Post the x-rays on the Internet for everyone to see.
Use coded numbers to protect the identify of the people involved, but allow the American people to see those 41 x-rays.
Yup, I am calling them liars!
Of course we are speaking only of probabilities. We do not have omnipotence. Your proposition that this is a horny teenage girl wanting to get it on with an older guy and having, not just one, but two kids, is at odds with all the known practices of the cult. Often, after kids were simply observed becoming sexually aware (simple flirting or an innocent kiss), we are told by former cult members that they were given in marriage to someone else at that point.
In other words, there is no support for your position from the evidence we have about the cult. There is plenty for the counter-position. If you want an angel to descend with gold plates with the specific truth about this situation, you will probably be waiting awhile.
Are you sure you're posting to the right person?
Priceless!!!!
Again, with the absolutes and the certainities sparked by outrage and not evidence. Why even have trials? Why not just have allegations?
1. subject to individual will or judgment without restriction; contingent solely upon one's discretion: an arbitrary decision.
2. decided by a judge or arbiter rather than by a law or statute.
The only times I’ve known of a baby being taken from a mother was when the mother was either so high on crack the baby was born into withdrawls OR she was so mentally ill that she was stated she wanted to stab it to death when it was born (and she said this repeatedly in front of me and other witnesses).
So no, taking babies is pretty rare.
I've hit it on myself before.
the808bass: “It’s the willful, coached obstruction of a government investigation which caused the problem.”
In other words, they aren’t cooperating with the witch hunt. What a shame.
Sarcasm aside, why are these children obliged to say anything at all to the government interrogators? Interrogate long enough and I don’t doubt CPS will find or fabricate all sorts of abusive evidence. Sorry, but I don’t trust government interrogators ONE BIT.
Secondly, you’re providing anecdotal evidence at best. There are over 400 children involved. Could the interrogators have made a mistake and confused info from different interrogations with different children? Are we talking about a couple children or a large percentage of them? Finally, how do you personally know any of this is even true?
Honestly, CPS hasn’t exactly come across as being very organized throughout this whole process.
If you want to argue about the practices of the cult, then you should read about them. If you don't want to read about them, don't posit things about which you have no idea. Or, ignore common sense and continue to jabber away to muddy the waters or simply pass the time away with mental gymnastics.
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