Utah attorney general responds to polygamist's U.S. Supreme Court appeal
 
By Jennifer Dobner
The Associated Press
North County Times - Escondido, CA
 
SALT LAKE CITY -- The U.S. Supreme Court should reject a Utah polygamist's petition to appeal his bigamy conviction because the case involved an underage bride and not a pair of consenting adults, Utah's attorney general said in a brief filed with the high court Friday.

"This isn't about consenting adults, this is about an adult who had sex with a minor," Assistant Attorney General Laura Dupaix said.

The 22-page filing is a response to an October petition from Rodney Holm, a former Hildale, Utah, police officer convicted of bigamy in 2003 for entering a religious marriage with a teenager when Holm was already married to her older sister.

The Utah Supreme Court upheld the conviction last year.

Holm is a member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a faith of nearly 10,000 who practice polygamy in arranged marriages, often with minor girls. Holm married 16-year-old Ruth Stubbs in 1998 when he was 32.

The U.S. Supreme Court last ruled on a polygamy case in 1879, when it banned the practice even in the context of religion.

It is unclear when justices will decide if they'll hear Holm's case.

Holm's appeal claims Utah's bigamy law violates his right to religious freedom and targets polygamists for their beliefs. It also asks justices to consider whether the federal ban on polygamy remains justified given modern cohabitation practices and recent court decisions related to the privacy rights of consenting adults.

In her filing, Dupaix rejects each of those issues as grounds for a Supreme Court review.

Utah's bigamy statute is "drafted to catch all bigamists in its net, irrespective of their subject motivations," she said in the brief. "If any group is being singled out for prosecution, it's predators."

Since the 1970s, three men have been prosecuted under the state law, Dupaix said. Two were polygamists who entered religious marriages with young girls; the third was a secular polygamist who fraudulently married multiple wives.

Dupaix also contends that court rulings protecting intimate relationships apply only to relationships between consenting adults, not to those between adults and minors.

The filing also argues that Holm is trying to elevate a "garden variety" state issue into a constitutional claim to get a case that lacks "widespread national importance" a review by the Supreme Court.

"We just don't think it's a federal question," Dupaix said.

Holm's attorney, Rodney Parker, said he had not read the filing, but was not surprised by Dupaix's arguments. He disputes, however, the idea that the case has no importance outside Utah.

"Local issues that implicate tens of thousands of people by definition are national if those federal constitutional rights are being locally violated," Parker said.

There are an estimated 37,000 polygamists in Utah and other Western states.

Also filing a brief with the court Friday was the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative legal group involved in lawsuits protecting religious freedom and against gay marriage.

"We saw this case as just sort of logically included under the heading of attempts to redefine marriage," ADF attorney said Chris Stovall.

The brief was filed on behalf of the Washington, D.C.-based Family Defense Council and also asks justices to reject Holm's petition.

"Marriage is a venerable social institution inherently involving public conduct, regulated by the state for the public good and justifiably protected from the ill effects of polygamy," Stovall writes.

Parker also had not seen a copy of the ADF brief, but said he finds it ironic that an organization that claims to advocate for religious freedom would fight the case.
 
nctimes.com
Originally published Friday, January 12, 2007
 
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