{"id":44,"date":"2010-07-28T10:33:20","date_gmt":"2010-07-28T10:33:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/07\/utah-supreme-court-got-it-right-in-jeffs-case.html"},"modified":"2010-07-28T10:33:20","modified_gmt":"2010-07-28T10:33:20","slug":"utah-supreme-court-got-it-right-in-jeffs-case","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/07\/utah-supreme-court-got-it-right-in-jeffs-case.html","title":{"rendered":"Utah Supreme Court got it right in Jeffs case"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Jeffs.jpg\"<\/span>Warren Jeffs may be a very bad man, but Utah prosecutors had no business charging him with accessory to rape in the case of a 14-year-old girl whose marriage to a 19-year-old cousin he ordained as leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS). In coming to the unanimous decision<\/a> that the judge’s charges to the jury were erroneous, the court effectively told the state that its “accessory to rape” theory was bogus. <\/p>\n

The young husband was himself only charged with rape after he testified on Jeffs’ behalf–and that case has still to be resolved<\/a>. The object of the exercise was to throw the heaviest book possible at the FLDS leader. During the trial, Jeffs’ attorney declared<\/a>, “”The state can say Warren Steed Jeffs is on trial, but it’s his…church, his religious beliefs that is on trial here, dressed up as a
\ncrime called rape.” Although the prosecuting attorney angrily denied it at the time, Utah Attorney General Mark L. Shurtleff essentially granted the point<\/a> yesterday: <\/p>\n

I do recognize and respect our judicial process and the Supreme Court’s
\nresponsibility not only for victims of crimes but people accused of
\ncrimes. But I am left scratching my head as to how we can, in the executive
\nbranch of law enforcement, go about protecting children from the actions
\nof religious leaders like Warren Jeffs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One way to do so might be to pass a law requiring girls to be married under the age of 18 to appear alone before a judge and testify that they consent to be married of their own free will. In the Jeffs case, the uncontested evidence suggests that the girl would not have so testified. But solving the problem by twisting the criminal law in order to go after religious leaders like Jeffs as such is not how we’re supposed to roll, under the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment.<\/p>\n

<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Warren Jeffs may be a very bad man, but Utah prosecutors had no business charging him with accessory to rape in the case of a 14-year-old girl whose marriage to a 19-year-old cousin he ordained as leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS). In coming to the unanimous decision that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nUtah Supreme Court got it right in Jeffs case - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/07\/utah-supreme-court-got-it-right-in-jeffs-case.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Utah Supreme Court got it right in Jeffs case - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Warren Jeffs may be a very bad man, but Utah prosecutors had no business charging him with accessory to rape in the case of a 14-year-old girl whose marriage to a 19-year-old cousin he ordained as leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS). 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}