Posted on 05/25/2008 9:03:56 AM PDT by MizSterious
Could the raid on the FLDS ranch in Texas happen here?
Critics of the April action accuse Texas of cowboy-style justice, trampling over constitutional rights by using lax laws that must be more liberal than other states.
That general point of view received a boost this week when a Texas court of appeals ruled that child protective services authorities acted improperly when they removed all 400-plus of the YFZ Ranch children and subsequently placed them in foster care.
However, the basic Texas laws that those authorities were following aren't that dissimilar to, say, Utah's.
Both states have criminal penalties on the books for engaging in sex with a 13-year-old — even if the teenager consents.
Both states have criminal prohibitions against sexual contact with older minors and restrictions on when a teen can lawfully get married.
And at least one child welfare expert says that to examine the difference of "why" and "how" the raid happened in Texas and not in Utah, the answers aren't on the law books.
"If you think the outcome would be different in Utah, the reasons would not be found in the child protection laws," said Scott McCown, director of the nonpartisan, nonprofit research organization called the Center For Public Policy Priorities based in Houston.
"A major difference between Texas and Utah is going to be numbers. ... You have a different response when you have a 10,000-kid problem instead of a 400-kid problem. It is also new to Texas and old to Utah."
Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff has said in the past that prosecuting polygamy in Utah would be impractical, flooding Utah jail cells with thousands of adults and putting even more children into the state foster-care system who were born from polygamous unions.
But McCown said Texas doesn't have that same problem.
"It goes back to the public policy of Texas that plural marriages are unacceptable — that they are a social evil. Texas basically had this one community, and it was possible for Texas to move against this community.... It goes back to the difference in the cultures, the magnitude and the numbers" between the two states, McCown said.
Numbers and culture
A pro-polygamy group's most recent census of plural communities puts those who consider themselves fundamentalists subscribing to polygamous beliefs at around 37,000 in Utah and surrounding states. In contrast, when Texas authorities entered the YFZ Ranch on April 3 to investigate a complaint of suspected child abuse, they believed there were between 100 to 150 people living there.
Texas officials saw that number quickly rise. The number of children alone was last reported at 464, including two infants born while in state custody.
The numbers help shape state response, or lack thereof, McCown noted.
"Inside Texas as well, along the border where you have thousands and thousands of children in very severe poverty, a child might be left in a neglectful situation," McCown said. "But in a rich, suburban area in the northern area of the state, it might not be tolerated. What's the difference? You can remove one, you cannot remove thousands."
McCown, who retired as a state judge in 2002 and presided over thousands of child-abuse cases, said because of federal government mandates, state laws on child protection and agency response can't vary too much.
"There's not much difference in the formal expression of the law. There may be some differences in practice, but the big reason practices may vary is the differences in the services that are available."
Texas also recently revamped its marriage laws after FLDS members acquired the ranch and moved there.
"The magnitude of the problem, from the Texas point of view, is that every person — every adult man and woman in a plural marriage — was committing a second-degree felony for which they can go to prison for 20 years," McCown said.
Bigamy in Texas is a second-degree felony if the "second" spouse is 16 or older and a first-degree felony if the second spouse is younger than 16.
"The way the state sees it, the way CPS sees it, these adults are knowingly committing felonies, knowingly tolerating felonies being committed, and those felonies involve the sexual assault of children," McCown said.
Culturally, the historical tolerance of polygamy is also absent in Texas.
The state, he said, doesn't see it as a "lot of adults in a plural marriage, with a different religion, different culture and so live and let live...."
Laws and children
Procedurally, both Texas and Utah have the right to take children into protective custody if authorities suspect immediate danger to the minor.
States don't have to wait to file criminal charges, they just need enough cause to believe that if the child isn't removed there will be immediate danger. The proof of neglect or abuse, or lack of it, unfolds later in family court under the umbrella of civil law, where the level of proof is lower than a criminal court.
In this scenario, the most common, practical example offered by Utah authorities is the child found in a home where a meth lab is discovered.
If both parents or guardians are arrested on suspicion of drug possession, there's no one else to take care of the child, and the child can't be left on its own.
The same can be said in the case of a meth-addicted mother who gives birth to a baby in a hospital and the baby tests positive for drugs. If the mother has threatened to take the baby and leave at first opportunity, investigators can take the child absent a warrant — or in Texas it's called a removal affidavit.
A warrant or removal affidavit is sought if there is time — requiring the review and ultimately a judge's signature authorizing the action.
That happened in Texas with the YFZ Ranch, and in Utah warrants of removal are obtained about 30 percent of the time children are placed in protective custody, said Julie Lund, chief of the Attorney General's Division of Child Protection.
"The big thing with the warrant is we need to establish why the parents can't be given notice and a hearing before custody is changed," Lund said.
"It's a very delicate balance," added the director of the state Division of Child and Family Services, Duane Betournay. "You have the need to protect the child and also the desire of not wanting to trample over parental rights and constitutional rights. It is a balance we have to ask ourselves constantly."
Betournay compared the varying avenues of authorities' response as rungs on a ladder — and the potential for violations increasing with steps taken absent parental input.
The risk to all
In Texas, a child protection supervisor testified that early in the ranch investigation that authorities were met with vague answers given by young teenage females obviously "selected" by adult men to be questioned.
Some of the girls didn't know their birth dates, said Angie Voss, and while they freely discussed the nature of their chores and daily living, they shut down or became "closed off" when it came to identifying who lived in their household and the nature of their relationships.
The girls also talked about being "persecuted by outsiders," Voss said, adding that a teenager told investigators she believed there was "no age too young to be spiritually" united with a man.
Additionally, if parents or guardians can't reasonably assure investigators of the safety and protection of children if they are to remain in the home in the midst of an investigation, the children can be ordered to remain in custody.
Six hours after arriving on the ranch, Texas CPS decided the children were at immediate risk for abuse, sought the removal affidavit from the judge, and by the next morning authorities started to bus the children off the ranch.
Critics argue that not all children — certainly not the babies, certainly not the young boys — could possibly have been in harm's way if they had remained on the ranch in the aftermath of the raid.
In Texas, as in Utah, there's a child protection provision on the law books dealing with "siblings at risk."
Third District Juvenile Court Judge Mark May said if there is a judicial determination that one child has been abused or neglected and a removal has been ordered, there is a presumption that other children in the same household are at risk.
"The way the state sees it, this was a community designed and organized for the purpose of carrying out felonious sexual assault against underage girls," McCown said. "All these adults were bound up in this culture, are part and parcel of it, so they (Texas authorities ) have a duty to protect the children."
However, in their ruling last week, the Texas 3rd Court of Appeals ruled the evidence for taking away all the children "was legally and factually insufficient.... Consequently, the district court abused its discretion in failing to return" the children.
On Friday, Texas child welfare officials appealed that ruling to the state's Supreme Court, also asking that the CPS be allowed to keep the children in foster care, though a dozen have already been ordered returned to their parents .
So, are you saying that Utah and other states with FLDS present, think that they should advert their eyes and pretend it isn't happening just because of the Constitution that doesn't protect the rights of pedophiles?
“Not surprised. They probably had plans for the property.”
I would say that no one had plans for the property, though, until after the ‘raid’.
The fact that real estate speculators, or anyone wanting to turn a fast profit, might see the potential in buying the now ‘improved’ land tract (1700 acres/est.), should the UEP have to sell it to recoup expenses, is just recognizing the reality of the current situation.
What does YFZ stand for?
“That’s the real difference between Texas and say Utah.”
But, Utah, Arizona, and Colorado were after JEFFS and his victims.
Those states did use laws to try and go after the criminal practices of the sect.
Warren was put in jail. He continued to ‘run’ the YFZ Ranch.
Whether he still does is questionable.
In Texas, though, the CPS decided to act, and had not been allowed access to homes, or the temple, and ended up getting a search warrant to do so.
They ended up taking the children ‘en masse’, after all was said and done (over a 3 day period), and then the Judge made an ‘en masse’ ruling.
This ‘en masse’ ruling is what most seem to question as constitutional.
It is now what the appeals are all about.
We have things in our country, in our courts that get approved by the authorities, and end up ‘unconstitutional’.
One person makes a decision, based on their knowledge, and experience, and try to fulfill the intent of the law.
How can you blame the whole state of Texas, for what you perceive that one Judge mis-judged?
As others have said, if we just hung judges for making rulings that the public declares ‘wrong’, then we would have no need for an apellate court process.
News flash: The Constitution does NOT guarantee the freedom to molest young girls or use them for sexual slavery. Utah isn’t honoring the Constitution, it’s trampling all over it by allowing this travesty of a religion to exist in that state.
The land in that area is NOT that expensive. It’s not California, where you can pay up to ten times the actual worth of a property. And if Texas does seize it to help pay the bills, I’m not at all sure what they’ll do with something set up the way the ranch is set up—what do you do with an oversized ugly temple surrounded by ugly dormitories? Farm land is not that valuable (and I know this first hand), so their farming enterprises aren’t going to be real moneymakers either.
Can you provide some proof for this claim? Because if not, then I'm just going to call a "baloney alert" on that one. The women (and many others who haven't written a book) have been pretty consistent in telling how they were treated. If they bought into it "hook line and sinker" it's because they were BORN into it. For most of their lives, it was all they knew.
None of these women have said anything about about another wife being added--one of them, in fact, even stated that she had to leave or her "husband" would have allowed her son to die--he didn't like the fact that out of all of his MANY children, this one son was born with an incurable disease, he thought it made him look like he had faulty genes. He wanted the son dead, out of sight, out of mind. Her daughter was about to turn 14, meaning she was about to married off to some drooling old geezer next. So she bolted.
Your claim that they all have individual freedom doesn't take into consideration the huge amount of intimidation, on every single possible level, from being told they will not be allowed into Heaven, to being shunned by family, all the way to the blood atonement.
Some "individual" freedom.
Do they or do they not follow Joseph Smith’s teachings and use his writings?
It is getting more and more difficult to not call these folks what they are. I am not talking about the victims of the state in the Sect, but the sickos here. I am really starting to see that this prospect of girls and old men excite them. They can’t quit talking about it, they post what I would say is close to child porn and run around yukking it up. Perhaps we should have noticed that they were projecting their freakish fantasies on others, but it hadn’t occurred to me. Just watch how they get all titillated and turned on by all of this.
One of the reasons I had to come to this conclusion was that as more and more CPS released/leaked information is proving to be false, and more and more of the wild rumors are false, the clan just continues passing lies off as rumors.
I think they pray that all the worst things happened to these children and young women. They pray and hope and cheer for news on perversion and wrongdoing so they can all sit around and breathlessly read about it. Sickos. I pray for the opposite. I hope no child was harmed in the sect. I pray that each child didn’t have these wild accusations happen to them. So far my side is winning. Each time news comes out, the news is bad for CPS. Bad for the mob.
Do they or do they not follow Joseph Smith’s teachings and use his writings?
They use some book of Mormon with a prior to date of which the date I don’t remember. That was an issue that had to be addressed when supplying the book to the children..... With a prior to date indicates it is an older version which wouldn’t have current changes incorporated in it assuming they have made revisions to their beliefs.
Keep Sweet..... ya hear!!
If anyone's been doing any "hoping" it's you, fella.
Yeah, that is what you would prefer and that was what you hope for in the end - that is why I posted that. Bolding and capitalizing it won’t help - people are smart enough to figure it out. You don’t want comparisons to Waco, but they are there and I will make them. Next time the CPS will just burn the evidence and people rather than be hassled like the storm that is brewing. I am on to your sickos though. You like reading about the stuff don’t ya? Truly disturbed individuals.
Say your prayers, so far God is answering mine and not yours. With every news release we find out all your darkest lies, hopes and dreams were untrue about these children.
Shame on you.
If anyone's been doing any "hoping" it's you, fella.
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