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.
Thanks for confirming what I thought I had read before, but couldn't find it again.
Oh?
Convicted criminal? Convicted of what, exactly? Making a false report in this case? And you're willing to judge and condemn her on evidence that's no more substantial that that which is being used against flds?
Has she stood trial? Has the evidence been presented in a court of law? Has she been found guilty by a jury of her peers?
What about her Constitutional rights? What about her right to due process? What about her being innocent until proved guilty?
All those who complain about people sitting in judgment of the flds are doing the very thing they condemn with this girl. Her picture is being plastered all over the place and she's being hung without a trial by the very folks who are screaming the loudest about Constitutional rights and due process when the flds is being condemned.
No one can say the phone call is a hoax because no one knows for sure. It has not been determined to be fact in a trial, and yet this one little tidbit released by the media that no one trusts is being treated as set in stone.
The hypocrisy is appalling.
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?
Not necessarily. The warrant was obtained on good faith. It's not the LEO's fault if the call was a hoax.
To your second question, yes.
This issue has been addressed MANY times over the last couple weeks. Go back through the threads and read. A keyword search of flds will take you to all the pertinent threads.
On youtube there are a few of Warren Jeffs instructional tapes you might find interesting.
:-)
Sorry, I went to get beer. Gotta keep the creative juices flowing. :-)
I know who Warren Jeffs is, but don’t see how it relates to this woman’s case.
I have 2 boys, both of whom have had a broken arm (Little League fall, bicycle fall). So we’re at 100% in this house ;)
What decibel levels do you suppose would be reached if men had to give birth?
Do you think those men would consider a ban on screaming if they got circumcised without pain killers?
We talked about that at the beginning of the thread; it looks like they may be kept together.
Mighty nice of them, if you ask me. :-)
Actually you can, but you need some real evidence, which can include statements by someone known to the person making the sworn statement required for that warrant. You can't make it up, as the BATFE did at Waco, or on the basis of something done at another place or by other people who used to run the place. Wether you can do it based on hearsay (second hand information) from a person unknown to even the person who reported the statements to the authorities, is the question in this case.
But to get back to Bubba's garage. If you have a witness that says he saw drugs in Bubba's garage, then you can get a warrant to search for drugs. Unfortunately the Courts have ruled that you can use any evidence you then find to charge Bubba with operating a chop shop. (Dealing in stolen merchandie). But you'd better be able to produce that witness, and you better have his statement first hand, preferably in writing or on tape and dated in either case. Otherwise Bubba is likely to walk.
It relates because if the baby had been born at the compound, the baby would have or could have been 'reassigned' to a sister mother. The birth mothers were subject to the 'relocation' of the children at the profit's (misspelling intentional) whim.
TX has protective custody--read legal but the infant is being kept (in protective custody) with his birth mother (something that may not have happened back on the compound).
And this from another thread, under your screenname.
Oh, believe me; I know about the Lost Boys. Boys barely mature that are tossed out to fend for themselves. Some because they drank and talked to girls, others because there was a limit on available young girls.
So. You knew it was illegal. But you played a shell game just to obfuscate. Why?
It is not the first time you have pretended to not know details about the cult which you admitted you were well aware of in other places. Your obfuscations on the UEP and property ownership come to mind, immediately. The question remains, why?
I think it was one of the "Mommies" (a comedy duo of the early 90s) who did a joke that the 'epidural is better than the sex that got you there (childbirth)' LOL...
This Court Order is an addendum (addition) to the original Order...because (tada!) this baby boy wasn't born when the initial Order taking the children into custody was issued. This Order is just a paperwork formality.
I admit I’m suspicious of government, but I’m not an anarchist. I just don’t trust government. It’s not that government officials are evil. No, I don’t doubt most of them want to do the right thing and think they are doing good deeds. Nevertheless, bureaucrats wield a very terrible power, one that we citizens must carefully monitor and keep in check. Honestly, there is no form of tyranny that can’t be justified by the phrase, “I only want to help you.”
I don’t really think the government has an agenda here beyond getting the facts. Nevertheless, the power to round up hundreds of children and subject them to foster care and interrogations by social workers bothers me. The goal may be worthy, but the process irks me as being too authoritarian. I at least entertain the possibility some of these folks are innocent.
And the only reason it did not was because they had no evidence, legally admissible evidence, not anecdotes of what happened at other places and other times. It looks like they still didn't have any when the first warrant was issued and served. And it's possible, although I don't know how likely, that when all is said and done, they'll have no admissible evidence.
To me, YMMV, it's very telling that no one has been arrested or charged with any crime, other than two that were directly occurring during the raids themselves, rather than any prior actions, even though it's been nearly a month.
Who did they take it away from? The state is keeping all minor mothers with their children. In this case, they know for sure who the mother is, so the baby is with its mother. Why do you have a problem with that? The mother is clearly in no position to support or house either of her children, and the father — who may or may not ever surface and make a custody claim — in nowhere to be found, so the state needs to take legal custody, but there is no indication that they have taken the baby away from the mother, or have any plans to.
Re #391
Sounds as if you have caught someone in a deliberate lie.
I entertain the possibility that not every member of the cult participated in child molestation or sexual assault of underage youths. And yet they remained there, wilfully subjugated themselves to the power of the child-molesting-enabler "prophet" Warren Jeffs. They had to know that their own children would eventually become fodder for the grandiose schemes of the cult. I'm not sure that's a good sign of their ability to raise their own children in safety.
CPS: “During our investigation of ktscarlett66, we found that 100% of the children suffered broken bones. During our subsequent interviews, the children claimed the injuries were sports related. ktscarlett66 confirmed the children’s claims in a post on Free Republic, but evidence relating to the injuries has not been independently verified. Our investigation continues.”
8)
It's the same power they have to round up two or three kids.
The magnitude of what happened here is really all that's different from most child abuse investigations.
People seem more horrified because it's happened to so many. If it's the principle, the horror should apply to ALL cases of taking children.
The recent NM case didn't seem to result in the same level of outrage, and yet it's virtually identical to this, except for the scale.
Maybe not even identical. I didn't hear whether or not they got warrants for that case.
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