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.
I said it before and I will say it again. This is why we have in investigation going.
Also, keep in mind everyone that these “marriages” should not be called such. They are not legal. There is nothing that shows they are legite in anyway. Just an excuse/windowdressing to sanitize the abuse and rape of children.
I don’t give a rats tale about polygamy. I care about children being forced to bear children and abused/brainwashed.
The grown women at the compound know they are wrong. They are complicit.
Why do you think they are and are coaching others how to LIE.
Surely if this was such an upstanding sitation, they could stand by their principle’s and stick it out defending their “beliefs”. They are hiding and lying about their so-called belief system.
Also, regardless of what it is, there is no religious acceptance or right to rape a child.
If it should not be called marriage and is not legal marriage then the state has a huge problem calling it a polygamist ranch. Maybe a Swinger’s Club.
The proof is building. They have to start somewhere. I am confident that nothing is being manufactured.
Warren Jeff’s is in prison for this. That whole, sick place has pictures of WJ all over the place...yuck.
Not one picture of our Lord, Jesus Christ.
I think it is a case of unscrambling eggs. However, now CPS will give an “ends justify the means and as long as we are at the CPS desired ends...” justification to continue on anyways.
You know, you should read up on this group because you are so ignorant about it’s existence.
If that guarantee was in place, most would not return.
Deceptive post. You left out that incest is not the only reason regarding pregnant minors. If the father is ANYONE other than another teen, the you-know-what would hit the fan and the dad would be branded a sex offender.
Not just danger BoT. The law quite clearly an purposefully states, "immediate danger."
No comment....:-)
The DNA doesn’t have to prove incest. The point of the DNA is to show that minor girls are forced to bear children with adult men...really adult men. If the DNA shows that there is incest, then it is another charge to add.
it may not be manufactures but given that CPS has now been slapped legally the criminal cases are clearly in jeopardy
Due process does not go out the window just because some desk jockey claims to really really really really know somebody is a bad person.
This ruling is all about whether CPS did their jobs correctly, the appelate court ruled CPS did not do their jobs correctly.
I didn’t get the impression that CPS made a pre-pub/post-pub distinction.
It seems to me, that it is this appeals court that is segmenting the children, and saying that CPS only demonstrated evidence of harm to post-pub girls. And that they erred by removing the male children and the pre-pub girls prior to a full court process.
In my opinion, if the post-pub girls are in danger, the other kids are too. Even if the perb’s attention has not been focused on the other kids in the past. That’s why I said this court was naive.
Apparently there are five. The adult members of those households don't appear to be among those that filed this particular appeal.
The appeals court judge ruled that the CPS and lower court had improperly treated the FLDS as one large household.
It doesn't sound like the young girls who are pregnant will be returned to their parents under this, and possibly not other children from those households.
The appeals court judge did seem to simple ignore some issues, such as the difficulty determining which children were from which household, however since that will likely have been figured out by the time the lower court actually implements this ruling, that won't likely effect the end results. It might have justified the lower courts actions at the time, and in that case keeping the kids in custody was justified at the time.
However, the appeals court judge mainly seems to be saying that the CPS' allegations didn't match the very limited circumstances in which removal is considered the only option. And removal may only be done when it is the only option.
You are closer to the facts than you realize, apart from confiscating the property, the intent of this Goat Roping was entirely to destroy the sect.
Mothers are already moving about Texas to be near their children and the kids are already being 'deprogrammed' by 'culturally sensitive' agents of the government.
For all practical purposes, THIS branch of the sect is dead, until the next time or until you can come up with bigger and better thought control laws.
It has already been reported that nobody was on government assistance so please stop posting bad information to make yourself feel better.
Good. Now let's see if any of those so adamant (and derogatory) in their statements will bother stopping by for a serving of crow.
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There is a HUGE difference between holding the government within its Constitutional limits and agreeing what the FLDS are doing.
Let the government set the bar concerning 'due process', and it will doom us all.
Yes, he is a crybaby.
Exuse me, but how many times do you see a case “under investigation” where no one is charged but there is probably cause enough to go forward with looking into the matter to make sure there is or isn’t a crime? I would say unless you have a smoking gun that rate would be about 70+%
You all talk about due process but you also know that child abuse (especially sexual abuse) requires patient investigation to find out if there is something there. That does not mean that someone isn’t getting due process.
If these YFZ (XYZ) people were not getting due process, then you would see Texas just taking the kids telling those people too bad. Texas has a big job getting to the bottom of this and they have the right to do so.
Well, as soon as I found out that the call was fake, I thought that they had been wrong to take all of those children...and then they reported that there had been abuse, a couple of dozen teenage girls were pregnant (which could indicate abuse), so I held my fire. But this ruling tells me that the State didn’t have squat in the way of evidence.
I am neither a lawyer nor a judge. So tell me, those of you with an actual knowledge of the law: Is there any remedy for the mothers whose children were unjustly removed from their care? This ticks me off almost as much as finding out that someone has wrongly lost 20 years of his/her life because of being convicted for a crime that he/she didn’t commit.
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