BishopAccountability.org
	Jeffs Guilty Salt Lake Tribune August 5, 2011 http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/opinion/52328853-82/jeffs-evidence-sexual-audio.html.csp The case against Warren Jeffs was never about polygamy, although he tried to make it about that. It was about pedophilia. A Texas jury convicted the leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints of sexual assault of two girls, ages 12 and 15, whom he took as plural wives. Based on the overwhelming evidence against him that the jury heard, that is a just verdict. American society may one day decide to tolerate polygamy among consenting adults. But it should never tolerate the sexual exploitation of children by adults, as in this case. Nor should it accept any justification for such behavior under the veneer of religious freedom. Jeffs, unwisely acting as his own attorney, argued that the prosecution against him was an unjust and unconstitutional attack on the freedom of his sect to practice its religion. The judge and jury didn’t buy it, and neither do we. Jeffs never offered a substantive defense to charges that he took two underage girls under the cover of plural marriage and consummated sexual relations with them. He never really tried to rebut the evidence from DNA testing of a baby born to one of the girls and audio tapes of his own voice instructing some of his wives, apparently including one of the victims, in how to please him sexually. One of the tapes apparently recorded the sounds of his sexual activities with one of the girls. The evidence revealed Jeffs to be a sexual predator dressed in religious garb. But no amount of religious claptrap from Jeffs during the trial could disguise the disgusting essence of what he did. The audio tapes provided the sounds of a sexual predator grooming his victims, as pedophiles do. The only aspect of this prosecution that is unsettling, aside from the photographic and audio tape evidence against Jeffs, is the way in which that evidence was obtained. The raid by Texas law officers and child-protection workers against the Yearning for Zion Ranch in 2008 arose from a bogus report of child abuse. The Texas courts decided that the mountains of documentary evidence obtained from the raid were admissible. That part of this case still gives us pause. But aside from our qualms about how the evidence that was so damning to Jeffs was gathered, there is nothing to suggest that the jury verdict is unsound. The extensive record-keeping by the FLDS, together with Jeffs’ perverse use of audio tapes to record his instructions to his wives and his own sex acts, leave little doubt that he committed the crimes for which he was charged.
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