B.C. prosecutor recommends no charges against polygamists
 
The Associated Press
The Columbian - Vancouver, Washington
 
VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) -- A special prosecutor has concluded there's not enough evidence to charge members of a southeastern British Columbia polygamist colony with sex offenses involving minors, partly because the women involved said they wanted to have sex with the older men.

Provincial Attorney General Wally Oppal said Wednesday he had reviewed a report by special prosecutor Richard Peck and agrees that no charges should be pursued against members of the fundamentalist Mormon sect in Bountiful, British Columbia.

The group is part of the southern Utah-based Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, known as the FLDS and headed by Warren Jeffs.

Oppal said Peck has recommended referring the case to the provincial Court of Appeal to determine the validity of the province's polygamy law. He said it is an issue that relates to the equality of women and that he personally believes the law against multiple marriages is valid.

In the Bountiful case, "The real issue here is that the number of so-called complainants that we have all told us that they consented to the act that took place," Oppal said.

At the time the incidents are alleged to have taken place, the age of consent was 14, though it's now been raised to 16.

"We really have no case as far as sex assaults are concerned," Oppal said.

Authorities tried to pursue charges that the women had been sexually exploited by a person in a position of trust, but that effort was again thwarted.

"There's no evidence of exploitation," Oppal said. "In fact, it was surprising to me the number of young women who told police that they were the aggressors, that they wanted to have sex with the older men."

Oppal asked for a special prosecutor to look into the case in May after a months-long review by his agency's criminal justice branch concluded there was no likelihood of any conviction on the charges.

Peck, in his report released Wednesday, said it's time to find whether Canada's laws against polygamy will stand under the country's Charter of Rights.

"I have come to the conclusion that polygamy itself is at the root of the problem," he wrote. "Polygamy is the underlying phenomenon from which all the other alleged harms flow and the public interest would best be served by addressing it directly."

The FLDS migrated to Canada in 1947 to avoid U.S. and Utah laws that banned polygamy. The group once numbered about 1,000, although a leadership struggle fractured the sect in 2004.

Church doctrine that touts plural marriage as a path to exaltation in heaven is rooted in the early theology of the Salt Lake City-based mainstream Mormon church.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, however, abandoned polygamy in 1890 as a condition of statehood and disavows any link to fundamentalists who continue the practice.

Jeffs, 51, is in the Washington County, Utah, jail awaiting a September trial on felony charges of rape as an accomplice for his role in the 2001 religious marriage of a 14-year-old girl and her 19-year-old cousin.

Peck said the challenge of the polygamy law likely would end up in the Supreme Court of Canada, but that a decision by the Court of Appeal would indicate how officials should proceed.

"If the law is struck down, the onus will be on the federal government to develop a new, Charter-compliant legislative solution to the problem," Peck wrote. "If the law is upheld, members of the Bountiful community will have fair notice that their practice of polygamy must cease."

Charges against members of the Bountiful colony were recommended by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police as far back as 1990. The government decided not to proceed, based on legal opinions that the polygamy ban would be struck down as an infringement on religious freedom, and that convictions on sexual exploitation charges were unlikely.

Peck said in his report he thinks Canada's anti-polygamy law does not violate the Charter of Rights guarantee of religious freedom.

"There is a substantial body of scholarship supporting the position that polygamy is socially harmful," he wrote. "Religious freedom in Canada is not absolute."
 
columbian.com
Originally published August 1, 2007
 
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