Members of polygamist sect ask judge to bar use of seized documents
 
By MICHELLE ROBERTS
The Associated Press
Fort Worth Star Telegram - Fort Worth, Texas
 
Ten men from a polygamist sect asked a West Texas judge Monday to bar prosecutors from using at their trials thousands of documents seized from their ranch near Eldorado, saying law enforcement did little to verify the domestic-abuse hoax on which the raid was based.

The men’s attorneys argue in documents filed in a San Angelo court that Texas Rangers used fake calls to a domestic violence hot line as an excuse to rummage through the Yearning For Zion Ranch in April 2008. The men say it was an unreasonable search and seizure.

Among the charges against the men, who belong to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, are bigamy and, in some cases, sexual assault of a child. The first trial could begin in October.

Texas Rangers and other law enforcement officers conducted the weeklong raid after a hot line received phone calls from a woman who said she was a pregnant 16-year-old mother whose husband beat her. The calls were found to be a hoax, but not before thousands of pages of church documents, family photos and writings by Warren Jeffs, the sect’s jailed leader, were seized from the ranch.

Lead defense attorney Gerald Goldstein argued in Monday’s filings that authorities failed to do even a basic investigation because they had been looking for an excuse to search the compound where roughly 700 people lived.

"Under the guise of looking for a man they should have known was not there and a child that did not exist, the Texas authorities conducted a general search to see what they could find," Goldstein wrote, summing up four days of testimony in May.

It’s not clear how soon state District Judge Barbara Walther might rule on the motion to suppress.

The state attorney general’s office has yet to file a response to Monday’s filings but asked Walther in June to find that law enforcement believed that the calls were legitimate at the time of the raid.

The arguments filed Monday cover all the defendants except the sect’s doctor, who faces only misdemeanor charges, and Jeffs, who is jailed in Arizona awaiting trial on charges that he arranged underage marriages. He was previously convicted as an accomplice to rape in Utah.

The FLDS believes that polygamy brings glorification in heaven. It is a breakaway sect of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which disavowed polygamy more than a century ago.

The pending criminal trials are separate from the child custody case — one of the largest in U.S. history — that ended with nearly all the children allowed to live with their mothers.

"The Texas authorities conducted a general search to see what they could find." Gerald Goldstein, lead defense attorney.
 
Star-Telegram.com
Originally published Mon, Jul. 13, 2009
 
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