Word: courting
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...Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) had basked in victory after the Texas Supreme Court ordered the return of the children taken from its ranch in Eldorado in April. But the state's attorney general Greg Abbott pledged to prosecute FLDS members to the full extent of the law. And this week, after going through evidence taken from the Yearning for Zion Ranch, Abbott indicted Warren Jeffs - the "Prophet" of the polygamists - along with four of his followers on charges of first-degree felony sexual assault of a minor. (The four men were not named, and law-enforcement officials...
Jeffs probably thought history protected him. Texas was probably gun-shy after the 1993 Branch Davidian conflagration near Waco. There was also one legal precedent that gave the FLDS comfort: the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas, that struck down the Texas sodomy law, closing the doors on the bedroom. The decision was hailed by gay activists as a landmark, but it also apparently heartened Jeffs. (It was soon cited by defense attorneys in their plans to appeal the 2003 conviction of a Utah man found guilty of underage sex and bigamy.) Says Mankin: "They thought...
...there also is a tradition of tough - and swift - justice in West Texas. After the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Texas sodomy law and news spread of the polygamists' move to the Yearning for Zion Ranch, a local state representative worked quickly and quietly to change the state's antiquated marriage laws. The age of consent was raised from 14 to 16, and marriages between stepchildren and stepparents were outlawed. The changes were modeled on a Utah law that was believed to have prompted Jeffs' decision to move his flock to more-remote places in Texas, Colorado and Mexico...
...London High Court judge has ordered British tabloid News of the World to pay $120,000 in damages to motor-racing chief Max Mosley following a weeklong court hearing involving frank discussions of prostitution, sadomasochism and "Nazi"-fueled...
...High Court judge David Eady dismissed that interpretation. "I found that there was no evidence that the gathering on 28 March 2008 was intended to be an enactment of Nazi behavior or adoption of any of its attitudes," he said in his 54-page ruling. "I see no genuine basis at all for the suggestion that the participants mocked the victims of the Holocaust...