Posted on 05/23/2008 3:59:55 AM PDT by familyop
SAN ANGELO, Texas (AP) — A Texas appeals court said Thursday that the state had no right to take more than 400 children from a polygamist sect's ranch, a ruling that could unravel one of the biggest child-custody cases in U.S. history.
The Third Court of Appeals in Austin ruled that the state offered "legally and factually insufficient" grounds for the "extreme" measure of removing all children from the ranch, from babies to teenagers.
The state never provided evidence that the children were in any immediate danger, the only grounds in Texas law for taking children from their parents without court approval, the appeals court said.
It also failed to show evidence that more than five of the teenage girls were being sexually abused, and never alleged any sexual or physical abuse against the other children, the court said.
It was not immediately clear whether the children scattered across foster facilities statewide might soon be reunited with parents. The ruling gave Texas District Judge Barbara Walther 10 days to vacate her custody order, and the state could appeal.
FLDS spokesman Rod Parker said sect members feel validated, having argued from the beginning that they were being persecuted for their beliefs.
"They're very thrilled. They're looking forward to seeing the children returned," he said.
The appellate decision technically applies only to 38 of the roughly 200 parents who challenged the seizure. But their lawyer, Julie Balovich of Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, said she expected attorneys for all the other parents to seek to join the ruling.
"It's a great day for Texas justice. This was the right decision," said Balovich, who was joined by several smiling mothers who nonetheless declined to comment at a news conference outside the courthouse here.
Every child at the Yearning For Zion Ranch in Eldorado was taken into state custody more than six weeks ago, after Child Protective Services officials argued that members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints pushed underage girls into marriage and sex and groomed boys to become adult perpetrators. Only a few dozen of the roughly 440 children seized are teenage girls; half were under 5.
The appeals court said the state was wrong to consider the entire ranch as an individual household and that the state couldn't take all the children from a community on the notion that some parents in the community might be abusers.
"The existence of the FLDS belief system as described by the department's witnesses, by itself, does not put children of FLDS parents in physical danger," the court said in its ruling.
The court said that although five girls had become pregnant at age 15 or 16, the state gave no evidence about the circumstances of the pregnancies. It noted that minors as young as 16 can wed in Texas with parental consent, and even younger children can marry if a court approves it.
Balovich said the appeals court "has stood up for the legal rights of these families and given these mothers hope that their families will be brought back together."
CPS spokesman Patrick Crimmins said department attorneys had just received the ruling and would make any decision about an appeal later.
"We are trying to assess the impact that this may have on our case," he said.
Even before Thursday's ruling, the state's allegations of teenage girls being pushed into sex appeared to be deflating.
Of the 31 sect members CPS once said were underage mothers, 15 have been reclassified as adults — one was 27 years old — and an attorney for a 14-year-old girl said in court that she had no children and was not pregnant, as officials previously asserted.
Five judges in San Angelo, about 40 miles north of Eldorado, have been hearing CPS's plans for the parents seeking to regain custody. Those hearings, which began Monday, were suspended after the appellate ruling Thursday.
The custody case has been chaotic from the beginning. The hearing in which Walther ruled that the children should all enter state custody ran two days.
Hundreds of lawyers crammed into a courtroom and nearby auditorium, queuing up to voice objections or ask questions on behalf of the mothers who were there in their trademark prairie dresses and braided hair.
CPS has struggled with even the identities of the children for weeks and scattered them across foster facilities all over the sprawling state, with some siblings separated by as much as 600 miles.
The sect children were removed en masse during a raid that began April 3 after someone called a domestic abuse hot line claiming to be a pregnant abused teenage wife. The girl has not been found and authorities are investigating whether the calls were a hoax.
The FLDS, which teaches that polygamy brings glorification in heaven, is a breakaway of the Mormon church, which renounced polygamy more than a century ago. Members contend they are being persecuted by state officials for their religious beliefs.
You would've brought marshmallows to the Waco fires, wouldn't you've?
I feek vindicated. Several anti-LDS posters here on FR trashed me for saying peoples rights were being violated even accusing me of being in favour of sexual abuse of children.
I wonder why they haven’t posted on these new threads?
OTOH, it's a great day because the 4th Amendment is actually being upheld.
If the gubmint is going to come onto private property and claim a crime has been committed, then they'd better damned well have the facts to back up their claims. Otherwise, let heads roll! The state clearly overstepped it's bounds here. I don't condone polygamy or minors being forced to wed adults much their senior, but I equally detest the state or federal gubmints when they get this notion that they do not have to abide by the supreme law of the land. This is a victory for the Constitution.
I'll be standing by.
So when our society allows injustice in one area (abortion and Planned Parenthood) we need to be fair and consistant, and allow it in other areas? Wow, that’s a formula for social order right?
The FLDS is about as “Christian” as Hamas is Jewish...that’s how close their beliefs are. (hey, they all believe in God, right?).
FLDS is a remnant of the original Joseph Smith/Brigham Young polygamy-is-essential cult, which always took pains to flout the law. By making illegal behavior an essential, it ceases to be a legitimate religion.
In the same way, Islamist groups, which make (literal) jihad against the US an essential are also not legitimate religions, and should be shut down, period. Instead all over the country such groups have set up terrorist training camps—right in our midst!
That we allow freedom to groups who purposely teach disobeying law—just because they call themselves religions—is a sure path to war and anarchy—not liberty.
Deliberately trying to muddy the waters eh?
Catholic hospitals and insurance programs not providing abortions is contrary to laws in California and a few other places. I guess they are an illegitimate religion too?
This is more than injustice: it is nonsensical. Since when is an underage pregnancy automatically grounds for removal from the home? Or a lifestyle that could possibly lead to physical harm? If this were the case half of the moms on welfare would have their kids put in foster care.
We have been hearing (as usual) almost nothing except Texas's side of the case- an attempt to propagandize the public and prejudice the case before it went to trial. Too bad you bought into it.
Smokers could have their children ripped from them, obese people, home schoolers, those who get tickets for forgetting to buckle their child while running to the store, parents who spank, the list goes on and on, all it takes is an anti spanking law or self righteous non smokers to throw a fit.
(and yes, polygamy--like terrorism--is still against the law)
What is polygamy? Men with more than one wife? Well the law does not recognize they are married so how can they be ? Right? So what you have is men with children from several other women. Well hell you may as well arrest half the NBA and NFL as well.
You mean the fires that we have various witnesses with physical evidence that the insane David Koresh set alight himself?
Just because all conservatives (understandably) hated Janet Reno and her boss Bill, doesn’t mean the FBI purposely or with negligence burned the Waco cult compound.
I think one has to be mighty paranoid to believe the FBI burned up the poor little cult members there. Cult leader Koresh always did teach it was the end of the world—and he was going to burn up with it—so he made sure of it.
Don’t forget Koresh murdered 4 ATF agents before the siege began. Was the attempted siege in hindsight wrong headed, and poorly done? Yep. Has Iraq by the Bush Admin been (in hindsight) exactly fully competently done? I don’t think so...
Government does mess up...all the time. Which is why we conservatives want less of it.
However—groups that hide behind the name religion, so they can systematically break the law—deserve no protection by the 1st Amendment.
Maybe Texas didn’t have a right to go in under the “protect the children” justification they used. In principle though, just the fact that the FLDS practices and teaches law-breaking polygamy is enough justification for the state of Texas to arrest their leadership.
My personal opinion is that FLDS will be immune after this, and will have found their methods of no records and control of women and children works to keep law enforcement from busting them for their crimes.
I hope there will be other trials like that for the leader, but I’m afraid they will be too little and too few.
I think they were afraid of another WACO...and "cowards of a sort".
The alternative?? Work out a plan where counselors would come in and talk to the individuals AND OBSERVE. Wouldn't THAT be a more normal approach?
The members of the family would all lie? So what. You have two eyes. Just imagine YOUR kid being stolen from your arms because "They thought.... Or your 10 year old...or 12 year old.
One was an act of war the other was not.
That being said however, both had to do with religion.
If my God required animal sacrifice for atonement, and the state passed a law forbidding animal sacrifice, does that mean my religion is no longer legitimate?
If my religion opposes same-sex marriage and refuses to officiate their weddings, and the state supreme court makes a ruling that gays can get married, is my religion no longer legitimate?
If my Bible teaches that God created the universe, and the state passes a law requiring that students be taught the theory of evolution, and I take my kids from the public schools and refuse to teach evolution, does that make my religion illegitimate?
Do you REALLY believe that it is the state, and it's laws, that defines what a legitimate religion is?
Mean while in Kollyvornia and Mass, Gay marriage and adoption by gays runs wild and is sanctioned by the gubmint.
Again, you need evidence, something clearly lacking in this case.
I don't think you understand my argument. I have no idea whether the justification the state used was sufficient. However, I do know for certain what no one disputes--the fact that the FLDS teaches and practices breaking the laws against polygamy. No evidence is necessary as the FLDS openly professes this (and it's the very reason that it broke off from mainline Mormonism 100 years ago).
Texas could and should have busted them for that, not an amorphous "abuse of children" charge.
So far as I can tell, the FLDS cult never issued more than one government-approved marriage certificate per adult male.
They believed (wrongly) that God called for men to have more than one wife, so they performed spiritual marriages that were not recognized by the state. They had men sleeping with multiple partners, and fathering children by those multiple partners.
They took great pains to attempt to practice their religion as they believed in it, without breaking the law. People DO get prosecuted for breaking the law.
The State of Texas passed a law according to some here at FR that prohibited arrangements that had the appearance of 2nd marriages, but so far as I can tell nobody has been successfully prosecuted for that.
In this country, there are millions of men who have had sex with more than one woman, and fathered children by those women. There are millions of men who have been married to multiple women, and have been sleeping with other women and having kids while remaining married to one woman.
And there are millions of men who, having had children by multiple women, now participate in the lives of those families, and raise those children as their father, regardless of who they are currently married to.
So far, the state has not made it illegal to have sex outside of marriage, to get divorced and remarried, to have children outside of marriage, or for a father to participate in the family life of multiple families he has fathered.
The state HAS decided that the benefits of a state-sponsored marriage are meant ONLY for the union of a single man and a single woman, because the state believes that arrangement is beneficial to the state, while other arrangements are not.
The only reason courts are not throwing out laws against polygamy is that the polygamist “lobby” is not as loud as the gay lobby, and the state hasn’t spent 30 years of public school convincing the next generation that plural marriages are just a lifestyle choice.
In the middle east, the laws forbid the teaching of Christianity, and in some states, the law forbids the practice of Christianity.
By your definition, Christianity is not a legitimate religion in those states.
You should also check to see who the first Freepers were to call this out.
They kept records, which have been widely published since they were seized in the raid.
A vast majority of children, if they remain religious, remain in the religion in which they were raised. Which could mean they were brainwashed into those beliefs.
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