Sect leader convicted on rape-by-proxy charges

ST. GEORGE, Utah - The leader of a polygamous
Mormon splinter group was convicted Tuesday of being an accomplice to
rape for performing a wedding between a 19-year-old man and a
14-year-old girl.

Warren
Jeffs, 51, could get life in prison after a trial that threw a
spotlight on a renegade community along the Arizona-Utah line where as
many as 10,000 of Jeffs’ followers practice plural marriage and revere
him as a mighty prophet with dominion over their salvation.
Jeffs, like his 15 followers in the courtroom, stood stoically as the verdict was read.

Prosecutors said Jeffs forced the girl into marriage and sex against her will.

The
jury deliberated about 16 hours over three days. On Tuesday morning,
the judge replaced a juror with an alternate for undisclosed reasons.
While
polygamy itself was not on trial — the couple were monogamous — the
case focused attention on the practice of polygamy in Utah, where it
has generally been tolerated in the half-century since a government
raid in 1953 proved a public relations disaster, with children
photographed being torn from their mothers’ arms.
Jeffs
succeeded his father in 2002 as president of the Fundamentalist Church
of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Former members say he rules with
an iron fist, demanding perfect obedience from followers and exercising
the right to arrange marriages as well as break them up and assign new
spouses.
Different accounts of marriage
At
the trial, widely different versions of the relationship — and Jeffs’
influence — were presented by the woman, now 21, and her former
husband, Allen Steed, 26.
At
their wedding in 2001 at a Nevada motel, the woman said, she cried in
despair when pressed by Jeffs to say “I do” and had to be coaxed to
kiss her new husband. The woman testified that FLDS girls receive no
information about their bodies or reproduction. She said she didn’t
even know sex was the means by which women had babies.
The
woman said the couple were married for at least a month before they had
intercourse, her husband telling her it was “time for you to be a wife
and do your duty.”
“My entire body was shaking. I was so scared,” she testified. “He just laid me on the bed and had sex.”
Afterward,
she slipped into the bathroom, where she downed two bottles of
over-the-counter pain reliever and curled up on the floor, she said.
“The only thing I wanted to do was die,” she said.
But
Steed testified that his teenage bride initiated their first sexual
encounter, approaching him after he fell asleep in his clothes after a
12-hour day at work.
Under
Utah law, a 14-year-old can consent to sex in some circumstances. But
sex is not considered consensual if a person under 18 is enticed by
someone at least three years older.
For reasons prosecutors have never explained, Steed has not been charged with a crime.
Jeffs faces charges in other cases
The
mainstream Mormon Church, or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints, renounced polygamy more than a century ago, excommunicates
members who engage in the practice, and disavows any connection to the
FLDS church.
Jeffs
is also charged in Arizona with being an accomplice to both incest and
sexual misconduct with a minor for arranging marriages between two
underage girls and relatives of theirs. In addition, Jeffs is under
federal indictment in Utah on charges of fleeing to avoid prosecution.
The
charismatic Jeffs was captured in a traffic stop last year just outside
Las Vegas after about 18 months on the run. At the time, he was on the
FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list, alongside such figures as Osama bin Laden.
Jeffs
was in a red Cadillac Escalade in which investigators found more than
$57,000, cell phones, prepaid credit cards, wigs and sunglasses.
Since
at least the 1920s, members of the FLDS have lived in the twin towns of
Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah, where the women wear long
prairie dresses and have long braided hair, and the men dress modestly
too, often in buttoned-up shirts.

All
homes and other property were kept in a trust controlled by Jeffs and
other church leaders until a judge in 2005 put an accountant in charge
because of allegations of mismanagement.