Posted on 05/22/2008 10:46:31 AM PDT by ElkGroveDan
SAN ANGELO, Texas - A state appellate court has ruled that child welfare officials had no right to seize more than 400 children living at a polygamist sect's ranch.
The Third Court of Appeals in Austin ruled that the grounds for removing the children were "legally and factually insufficient" under Texas law. They did not immediately order the return of the children.
Child welfare officials removed the children on the grounds that the sect pushed underage girls into marriage and sex and trained boys to become future perpetrators.
The appellate court ruled the chaotic hearing held last month did not demonstrate the children were in any immediate danger, the only measure of taking children from their homes without court proceedings.
If the immediate danger was a girl being statutoraly raped, then the only children in immediate danger were those girls who were of age to be raped, based on the evidence presented.
You COULD make a case to take away all the children. But under Texas law, the immediate seizure rules specifically require an immediate danger. If there is no immediate danger, the CPS is supposed to present a case, and let a judge rule whether the children should be taken or not.
The CPS could have gathered evidence, and if they found a mother who had forced her older daughter into sex, they could present that information to a judge, and the judge could rule that the mother’s younger daughter be taken.
There was no hurry to do so, because there was no immediate threat.
That is the ruling of the appeals court.
Whether you agree with the ruling or not, at the very LEAST this should put to rest the hysterical claims of the pro-CPS folks that anybody who opposed the action was child abuse-lovers and had no leg to stand on. A 3-judge panel who is intimately familiar with the case and the law has just agreed with us.
To hell with FACTS! They don’t like what they THING they are doing! They sound like the freaking ‘Rats in 1981 who were trying to hold hearings on the RUMORS that George HW Bush flew in a SR-71 to Iran to negotiate the release of the Iran hostages the day Reagan took office. Their reasoning was the very fact that there was no evidence was in itself EVIDENCE!
Perhaps the appeals court will issue an order to the state of
Texas and force them to return the children to their parents.
Snicker...
Why don’t you post a link to the Texas Ranger report that detailed specific abuses seen.
Oh no, we're all just child molestors at heart.
Yes, I’m afraid so.
We’ll have to put away our faggots.
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(in an effort to not get banned):
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faggot - 1. a bundle of sticks, twigs, or branches bound together and used as fuel, a fascine, a torch, etc.
Fine. The bigger the hit the state has to take, the better. Maybe there won’t be enough money left to fund the CPS and it gets closed down.
Y'know, a good lawyer for the FLDS families could probably argue that NOT doing that was religious discrimination or unequal protection...
I have to improve on that.
Not only was there no observed threat, there was no alleged or suspected threat, either.
So why is it again the babies needed to be removed from the mothers?
CRICKETS.
I hated the mob’s use of that. They would call you a child molestation supporter, rape supporter, polygamist, and an flds member (or working for flds), or demand you admit you were Mormon while asking ridiculous rhertorical questions - then use that word after giving 2 minutes for a response.
CPS exists to protect children, and they are conditioned to do so. Of course, they are also alert to the possibility, one might say excessively so. If they hear that a child is in danger, they think they must act quickly. I'm sure they actually do end up protecting some children, but in the process they harm many families.
Once, a young mother had her 2 children killed by a boyfriend. All the news media asked why CPS didn't do something about it before it happened. CPS agencies all over went on heightened alert, so as to be sure nothing like that would happen in their area.
When they take a child out of the home, they take it to a recieving home, where all the amenities of childhood are available. They go on outings, watch whatever they want on TV, play video games, and have non-threatening conversations with adults. The kids actually enjoy the experience, and don't really want to go home right away. They tell the workers, and the workers think it must be because the child is afraid of abuse. Even if it is found that the child is not abused or in danger, a record exists.
But liberals justify these actions the same way they justify a lot of laws and regulations: If only one child is saved, it's worth it. They say that about gun laws.
I guess that will be the new line. “We all knew there were problems, but we can’t go back in time and fix it”.
Well, I don’t remember anybody saying that yesterday, but it will be nice to have some from the “other side” joining the ranks of those of us who could see long ago that there were problems, and hoped that it could be fixed before it was too late.
You’re not the real Ron Jeremy.
Well then how did so many of the “idiots” (myself included) on this forum KNOW that the authorities had acted improperly by seizing all those children.
I am not a legal “expert”, but based solely on the reporting by the media (which was VERY unsympathetic to the cult), I KNEW something was wrong with the way this was handled and I have been denouncing the seizure of those children since the day it was first reported.
My gut instinct was that the whole thing “stunk” and my gut instinct is usually correct when it comes to the government overstepping the limits of its powers. My “Government BS” detector is VERY finely calibrated.
It will be intesting to see how this plays out, to be sure.
“there’s a distinct absence of facts supporting ‘em”
Facts about closed, insular societies are notoriously difficult to come by. Sometimes even for those in the societies themselves. See here:
http://www.statesman.com/search/content/shared-gen/ap/National/Polygamists_Family_Tree.html
Some nuggets from that, if you don’t care to go to the link:
Hand-scrawled records taken from a polygamist sect are helping untangle the spider-web network of family relationships at the Yearning For Zion ranch, where some husbands had more than a dozen wives.
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The records, released by court officials last week, include 37 families totaling 507 individuals. At the time the lists were written from March through August of 2007, most of the people were living at the YFZ Ranch, though others were in homes along the Utah-Arizona line.
Two-thirds of listed households were polygamous, with the brothers of Jeffs and a senior elder claiming the most wives, up to 21 in one case.
Men still in their 20s made up most of the dozen monogamous marriages.
The husbands and wives were married in the FLDS, and none is believed to hold Texas marriage licenses.
Of the 19 youths listed as being 16 or 17, none of the boys are husbands, while nine of the girls are listed as wives. Only one 17-year-old girl remained unmarried.
Under Texas law, children under the age of 17 generally cannot consent to sex with an adult.
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Church elder Wendell Nielsen is listed as having the most wives at 21. Two of Jeffs’ brothers also had numerous wives. His brother, Nephi Jeffs, had 14 wives listed. Isaac Jeffs, the brother who was driving Warren Jeffs when he was arrested outside Las Vegas in August 2006, had 10 wives listed.
The records, taken from a safe in an office at the ranch, were among the truckload of documents, computer disks and family Bibles seized from the ranch during a six-day search for records that showed underage marriages. Parker said he was unsure how complete the records are or what purpose they served.
COLORADO CITY, Ariz. — As the supper dishes were being cleared away and the rice pudding brought out for dessert, Marvin Wyler’s two wives, along with some of their children and a group of friends, began poring over the list.
The 44-page document, from a court in Texas, gives a glimpse of who is married to whom in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints — and in the world of religious polygamy, a list like that is a sort of Rosetta Stone to the usually hidden relationships of power, politics and piety.
“We are adding up the number of men who may be going to prison,” said Isaac Wyler, 42, the eldest of Wyler’s 34 children, who was examining the list Sunday to see which men may have had wives under the legal age when they married.
I’ve been following news stories of this cult from well before they came to Texas.
Several of us posted that the original action would have a difficult time making it through court.
We got skewered by others.
Next, will come the lawsuits, which the citizens of Texas will end up paying for.
31 of the 53 women believe to have been underage turn out to be adults. They haven’t said if any of the remaining 22 are pregnant or have kids.
460 x $1,000,000 = $460,000,000.00
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