Getting creative on polygamy prosecution

It being Mother's Day, let's turn our attention to the legislative aftermath of the 2008 Great Eldorado Polygamist Roundup, where more than 400 children were taken from their parents at a West Texas ranch run by a polygamous Mormon sect, the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (FLDS).

This time last year, FLDS children were separated from their mothers based on a creative legal ruling that the parents' religious beliefs constituted per se abuse; appellate courts later overturned those interpretations and ordered the children's return. Now the Texas Legislature is flexing its own creative muscles trying to salvage prosecutions from this fiasco.

Legislation to lengthen the statute of limitations on bigamy passed the Senate and will be heard this week in the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee. Apparently, since authorities couldn't prosecute polygamists at the YFZ Ranch in West Texas as they'd prefer, they now want to give prosecutors up to seven years to pursue bigamy cases, ten if they involve a minor (although no victims are clamoring for prosecutions). The current statute of limitations for bigamy is just three years, as is the case for most felonies.

A different House committee already heard related but much broader legislation that has not moved nearly so far along in the process, so if this gets to the floor, I'd expect Reps Harvey Hildebran and Drew Darby to try to load it up with all the extra mischief in their bill. Sometimes you really have to get creative if you want to use the force of the state to impose your personal moral code on others but can't figure out how to do so within the constraints of their constitutional rights.

The blogger at Sore Toes and a Bleeding Heart yesterday blogged about the creative lawmaking that changed Texas' marital laws in 2005 to target polygamous Mormons who'd recently moved to West Texas. "Toes" pulled the money quote of the hearing from state Rep. Harvey Hildebran, who told the committee that any abuse report "has to come from inside, so we’ve got to be a little bit more creative in how we get the report."

Given what transpired after that, with more than 400 children seized on the basis of a hoax phone call, this is one of those quotes that makes you go, "Hmmmm." After all, the search warrant on which the raid was based was full of official "creativity."

Over at The Common Room, the Headmistress Zookeper further analyzes details from the original affidavit used to obtain the YFZ search warrant, noting that we now know a worker at a women's shelter suggested the name "Dale Barlow" to Rozita Swinton, the hoax phone caller (who claimed she'd been married three years but didn't know the name of her husband), after finding it on an Internet search while they were talking. The Headmistress also points out that Rozita's claim to have been treated at the local hospital was checked out by the Texas Rangers before the raid but couldn't be confirmed.

"There doesn't seem to have been any single identifying information in Ranger Brooks' application for a search warrant that he or somebody else didn't find via googling," she concludes. In other words, as Grits first suggested three days after the raid, the Great Eldorado Polygamist Roundup was a "setup job."

None of this inspires confidence. What's needed at this point to reestablish trust in the system are fewer "creative" efforts and more respect for the law and individual rights by Texas' political leadership.