Court: Texas erred in polygamy case

Not enough evidence to seize children

The state of Texas removed 464 children last month from the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Eldorado on allegations of abuse. (TONY GUTIERREZ/ASSOCIATED PRESS)

WASHINGTON - A Texas appeals court ruled yesterday that child protection officials lacked the evidence to seize children from the compound of a polygamist sect last month, rejecting arguments that the group's belief system was itself a dangerous form of abuse.

The higher court's decision was issued in Austin in response to petitions from 41 mothers.

The court did not immediately return the 464 children seized at the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Eldorado to their parents. But analysts said the state's justification for the raid at the compound run by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) might have been fatally undermined.

"Even if one views the FLDS belief system as creating a danger of sexual abuse by grooming boys to be perpetrators of sexual abuse and raising girls to be victims of sexual abuse," the three-judge panel wrote, "there is no evidence that this danger is 'immediate' or 'urgent' . . . with respect to every child in the community."

If Texas officials cannot produce new evidence of abuse, or win an appeal to the state Supreme Court, legal analysts and attorneys involved in the case predicted that many of the children eventually could be returned to their parents. The appellate judges directed a lower court to vacate orders that had granted the mothers' children to the custody of the state.

James Paulsen, a professor at South Texas College of Law in Houston, said the court seemed to have demolished a main pillar of the state's argument for seizing all the sect's children, instead of only those for whom there was proof of physical abuse.

"The notion that you can take an 18-month-old child . . . and say that a child that isn't old enough to talk is somehow being influenced by a toxic environment is nonsense," Paulsen said. David Schenck, a Dallas attorney who represented some of the mothers, said the state would now have to present evidence that individual children were physically harmed, instead of seeking to portray the entire sect and its compound as unfit for children.

The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, which now has custody of the children, issued a statement yesterday defending its actions and contending that investigators had found "a pervasive pattern of sexual abuse that puts every child at the ranch at risk."

A spokesman for the department, Patrick Crimmins, said that the idea of appealing the decision "is being considered right now. No decision has been made."

In a sign of the murkiness that still surrounds this case, Crimmins said that child-protection workers were unsure how many of the children actually belong to the mothers who had filed petitions. State authorities have described "a pattern of organized deception" among sect members, in which children and adults either gave false information or no information at all about their age or family relationships.

The case began April 3, when Texas authorities raided the 1,700-acre ranch, set in scrubland near the west Texas town. The move was triggered by a series of phone calls, made to a domestic violence shelter in nearby San Angelo, Tex., by a young woman who said she had been forced into marriage and teenage pregnancy at the ranch.

Later, though, authorities said the calls may have come from a woman in Colorado, with no connection to the ranch and a history of making similar false claims.

Child protection officials said after the raid that it didn't matter if the calls were a hoax. They said they found damning evidence of sexual abuse on the ranch, including underage mothers.