You know, really, that is the issue that is being completely ignored. They apparently were untruthful, but the state was supposed to be able to amass evidence without doing anything but asking them questions and then believing whatever they said.
Strange.
susie
I suspect a lot of the ID documents they’re providing aren’t particularly reliable. Remember, they controlled the government in the two counties in Utah and Arizona where their original communities are located. Nearly all the babies are born at home or in a church-controlled clinic, attended only by members of the church. They’ve been in the business of actively concealing the ages of their girls since at least the 1950s, and I imagine they’ve got a lot of tricks perfected.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there are ID documents being traded around and even flat-out falsified. Given that they’ve continued marrying off 14 year old girls in Utah after the legal age was raised to 16, it may well have become standard practice to arrange ID documents for those girls that inflate their age by at least 2 years. In the absence of state-issued birth certificates, all it takes to get a driver’s license is a court determination that your identity/age/place of birth are such-and-such, which a court will issue based on affidavits from relatives and other members of the applicable community. When the court is controlled by the cult leaders, the judge will accept any affidavit that has the leaders’ support, even if the judge knows for a fact that the information is false. I imagine this is one of the reasons that the Texas authorities weren’t just taking ID documents issued in Arizona or Utah at face value. That and the fact that in many cases the documents would have given just one or two or three or names that the presenting woman had given to authorities over the first few days after the children were removed.