Word: utah
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...jury in St. George, Utah, agreed with the proscution. Jeffs, who heads the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints (FLDS), was found guilty of two counts of being an accomplice to the rape of a 14-year-old girl, known throughout the trial as "Jane Doe IV," by forcing her into marriage with her first cousin, Allen Steed. In a town that is a 50-50 split between old Mormon residents and newcomers with more liberal politics and lifestyles - a split echoed in the makeup of the eight-person jury - it was a gamble for both...
Indeed, the legal strategy used so effectively in St. George grew out of a "polygamy summit" held in 2003 by the attorneys general of Utah and Arizona. They had brainstormed and decided to launch an aggressive effort to utilize child abuse, domestic abuse and fraud laws to break the cycle of child marriages. Bigamy, although against the law in Utah, is sometimes difficult to prove and does not carry the heavy penalties found in child abuse laws. Gary Gale, an Ogden, Utah defense attorney who has worked in several high-profile cases involving polygamy, knows this well. In January, Gale...
...construction crews work across the region, but home is Hildale, Utah, and neighboring Colorado City, Arizona, two ramshackle settlements 40 miles from St. George and set on a high prairie in a glorious mountain setting. For every tongue-tied Merril Shapley who has chosen to stay, there are other boys, perhaps as many as 1,000 or more, who have been cast into exile for offenses as trivial as acting out or watching forbidden movies. Dubbed the "Lost Boys," - exiled boys far outnumber girls - they live in low rent apartments or on the street, in the backs of cars...
Awareness of the plight of the "kids from the creek" began in Utah about four years ago. Volunteers working with street kids and runaways began to notice a new breed of homeless teen who didn't have the survival and social skills other teens had. But long before public awareness began to rise, Brenda Jensen, a co-director at Hope Organization, took runaway boys into her home. She fled the FLDS 30 years ago and married a fellow exile from another polygamist group...
Their allegiance to each other and family members makes pursuing legal redress difficult, according to Paul Murphy, an assistant to Utah's Attorney General Mark Shurtleff. Any attempts to try to hold parents accountable has been rebuffed by the boys. In meetings with Shurtleff, Murphy said, the kids have warned they would stop cooperating if agencies moved against their parents...