| Jury selection continues in W. Texas polygamist sect trial | |||
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By TERRI LANGFORD HOUSTON CHRONICLE | |||
ELDORADO — The first criminal trial stemming from the Texas raid of a polygamist ranch continues this morning with the second day of jury selection. By late Monday, 138 remained of 300 potential jurors originally summoned. Visible in the pool were at least a dozen members of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints, a breakaway Mormon sect who practice polygamy and are easily identifiable by their frontier-style dress. The group's 1,700-acre Yearning For Zion Ranch, located about 200 miles northeast of San Antonio near Eldorado, was descended upon by Texas Rangers and law enforcement in 2007 after child welfare workers found several underage girls who were pregnant or mothers. Once jurors are selected, they will begin hearing testimony in the child sexual assault case against Raymond Merril Jessop, the first of 12 FLDS members to face trial for their part in arranging or participating in underage marriages. His father, Frederick Merril Jessop, is the senior leader of the FLDS because the group's prophet, Warren Jeffs, is jailed in Utah for forcing girls into underage marriages in that state. Both Jeffs and the elder Jessop are among the defendants in the Texas case, and each will be tried separately. On Monday, at least seven FLDS members among the jurors told attorneys there were related to the defendant. Another 12 potential jurors, none of them FLDS members, said they could not put aside what they knew about the case and make an unbiased conclusion based on the facts. Another 13 said they could not, because of personal reasons, deliberate on a sexual abuse of a child case. At least three dozen had a problem with the idea of probation for a sexual assault case, which is a possible sentence under the guidelines. Schleicher County is small, with only 2,800 people. The jury selection process has been an amusing look at how everyone knows everyone, even for county residents: When asked how many people knew the sheriff, the entire jury pool laughed. Defense attorney Mark Stevens laughed at his own question. The Texas Attorney General's office is leading the prosecution of the case, which stems from Jessop's suspected relationship with an underage girl who was in labor for three days in 2005. When the group approached their leader, Warren Jeffs, he told them not to take her to the hospital because her age would bring police scrutiny. "I knew that the girl being 16 years old, if she went to the hospital, they could put Raymond Jessop in jeopardy of prosecution as the government is looking for any reason to come against us there," Jeffs wrote in a journal seized by authorities from the ranch. Jeffs was arrested a year later and convicted of being an accomplice to rape in 2006 and convicted as an accomplice to rape in Utah for his part in arranging an underage marriage there. He faces charges in Arizona for the same thing. Texas officials were contacted by a women's shelter on March 31 and told that a caller had contacted them from the ranch and claimed to be a sexually and physically abused underage FLDS wife named Sarah. Officials with the women's shelter notified Texas Child Protective Services and caseworkers were sent to the ranch April 3. After seeing several young girls who were pregnant or mothers, a decision was made to remove all 439 children from the ranch, a move that was later reversed by the Texas Supreme Court. The children were removed from the ranch and placed in foster homes across the state an action that cost Texas taxpayers more than $12 million. The children were eventually reunited with the parents, and the initial caller turned out not to be a resident of the ranch. To date, about 60 percent of the hundreds of FLDS members who once lived at the ranch have returned. At one time, there were as many as 1,200 people living there, according to an FLDS spokesman. terri.langford@chron.com | |||
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chron.com Originally published Oct. 27, 2009 | |||
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