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.
Thank you for trying.
Are you incapable of debating a legal issue without personal attacks? This speaks more of your intellectual horsepower than it does about me.
It’s simple, the law does not care about ethics and morals. The law deals with facts. We are a country of laws. Seems pretty basic. You cannot charge your neighbor with being a immoral and miserable person. There is no law against that. If you want to charge the FLDS, then present your charge and follow the rules. It’s really very simple. Part of the rules deals with evidence and how that evidence was gathered.
For example, I can not sneak into your home and search it for anything that is illegal. I cannot get a Search Warrant for Bubba’s garage to look for drugs, then find that he’s running a car chop shop. Any evidence I gather under the drug based Warrant is inadmissible. The warrant must match the evidence gathered.
In the case of the FLDS, we have a convicted criminal who’s phone number matches the phone records of the call that started it all. This would tend to make the original Search Warrant invalid. Thus, with an invalid Search Warrant - is any evidence gathered admissible in our court system?
But other posters have just stated that even in regular populations of kids, there are a lot of broken bones. So them saying there were none would be a bigger lie.
OK, so you think all of this is a lie? Golly, wonder why?
Me too. I wish we could delete like we can on the state threads.
First of all HIPPA Privacy regulations do not permit posting of personal medical information in any public forum. It is not for viewers on the Internet to determine physical abuse. Trained radiologists, with their malpractice insurance policies on the line, truthfully read the films and report their educated findings to the CPS. It is up to the legal representatives of those accused of the abuse to challenge the findings. Not AOL subscribers...
Please see post 178.
Good grief. THEY DID NOT SEPARATE HER FROM HER CHILDREN!!!!!!!!
I, too, looked at Merriam-Webster online, and also looked at the word "vow" at that site. Vow = "a solemn promise or assertion." "Assertion" = claim, right? So add the "dis" and you get "disclaim," which is what you relayed above.
So if we agree disavow = disclaim, and vow = claim, what kind of ticky-tack definitional track are you getting into that makes no point at all? (Kind of a stretch for you to deny this linkage).
If you still want to play stubborn games about the overt linkage, look at the etymology of the word: OnLine source: http://books.google.com/books?id=ejwpPpO-1hgC&pg=PA58&lpg=PA58&dq=%22etymology+of+avow%22&source=web&ots=B3NdiVHo4b&sig=8uwVZ8_IQhQsEUAjRrjj_apJNeI&hl=en
"Disavow, dis and vow, from Lat. vovere, to vow or promise. To annul a vow, to renounce or abjure, refuse to abide by, that which has been vow-ed…or promised; and then, generally to disacknowledge, to disallow, to disown, to disclaim.” Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, or Universal Dictionary of Knowledge, ed. Vol. 18, London , 1845, p. 58.
For someone who says they are of "English ancestry," quit making a fool out of yourself by trying to "lecture" the esteemed English editors of that mid-19th century London classic. (I think I'll accept their standard English definition/etymology of the word--one that's been in print as this shows for over 160 years...showing that the word is indeed tied to "annulling a vow" or "abjure"--which means to renounce a solemn oath.)
(Oh, the next time you want to use such uneducated ignorance of the etymology & definition of words just to accuse somebody of an internal emotion of which you have absolutely no basis to judge because you don't know my heart, I'd suggest you "error" that time on the side of restraint)
Read all of the testimonies from escapees and castaway children about what has gone on within this circle of people. or at least many. I follow every thread that comes up on this topic. This belated action by Texas didn't just happen. It should have happened years ago.
When I think of this baby boy ......he’s free to cry.
Trained radiologists, with their malpractice insurance policies on the line, truthfully read the films and report their educated findings to the CPS. It is up to the legal representatives of those accused of the abuse to challenge the findings.
It is not up to "media reports" that 41 children had bone injuries, without any factual information to back those statements up.
I fully agree with you!
Again, I don’t think you have read much about this...saw some of the provocative (flaming) posts, and decided to join in. Without exaggeration, there are thousands of posts here on dozens of threads DETAILING what CPS found; what the TX Rangers found; what flds ‘escapees’ have reported. Read up and then post...
To you maybe.
When you presuppose it's a witch hunt, your conclusion will find it's a witch hunt.
Sorry, but I don’t trust government interrogators ONE BIT.
Thanks for being honest about your presuppositions and biases. The more clear we are about these, the more transparent and productive our discussions can be. From that statement, you say that it's pointless to discuss anything with you at this point. For all the evidence we have on the case is from the distrusted government interrogators. Anything they say is automatically false to you.
So, you have an unfalsifiable hypothesis. Those types of hypotheses do not produce the strongest arguments. I don't mean that as a slam. It's just a statement of fact. No matter what the outcome is, or what evidence is produced, it is from the government and could be manufactured, trumped-up, or otherwise falsified.
I don’t know,
Some guy’s like dreaming of girls taking off their aprons and flashing their bloomers.
DETAILING what CPS found; what the TX Rangers found; what flds ‘escapees’ have reported.
Odd in so much of the flds 'beliefs' I find similarities to Islam. In birthing, they subscribe to the Scientology 'silent birth' method. Hmmmmm...could the Jeffs have been reading L. Ron Hubbard?
No tablets, just a fair trial of clearly-defined criminal offenses.
And up until Sept. 1, 2005 that was possible in Texas, with parental permission. The law was changed because the FLDS was known to be coming to Texas. Which I find passing strange, since so many, including the authorities, are maintaining that these people are not and were not getting legally married anyway, so why bother changing the law to prevent them from doing something they were not doing anyway. The laws regarding age of consent for sex, which would apply in the absence of legal marriage, including all Second or Third wives of a polygimist, were not changed. 17 is the age of consent, but there is an exeption if the ages of those getting and giving permission (it works both ways actually) differ by 3 years or less, and the younger is at least 14.
The media reports came from the statements of TX CPS who were remarking on the findings of (!!!) radiologists!!!
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