San Angelo, USA - Polygamist leader Warren Jeffs, accused of sexual assault with two underage girls he took as wives, has cast out his own defense lawyers and is asking a Texas court to follow God's words as he hears them.
Jeffs, head of a breakaway Mormon group with an estimated 10,000 members, startled a San Angelo, Texas, courtroom Thursday by firing his lawyers and announcing he would defend himself against charges that could put him in prison for the rest of his life.
"I, the Lord God of heaven, call upon the court to cease this open prosecution against my pure, holy way," Jeffs, reading from what he said was a statement from God, told Judge Barbara Walther on Friday after she sent the jury out of the room.
Jeffs said if the trial continues, God told him, "I will send a scourge upon the counties of prosecutorial zeal to make humbled by sickness and death."
Prosecutor Eric Nichols responded that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled more than 100 years ago that religious freedom does not extend to polygamy. Walther warned Jeffs she would remove him from the courtroom if he threatened jurors.
Jeffs, 55, inherited the leadership of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints from his father and regards himself as God's prophet. He directs his followers in how to live their lives and arranges marriages of men to several female members.
His trial stems from a raid by Texas authorities in 2008 on a large rural church compound near Eldorado, Texas, following allegations that young girls were being forced into polygamist marriages with older men. Child protection officials temporarily took custody of more than 400 children living at the church's Yearning for Zion ranch.
Texas courts later ordered them returned to their families. Authorities said many of the underage girls were pregnant or had given birth.
Prosecutors told jurors they have an audio recording of the defendant raping a 12-year-old girl and DNA evidence showing he impregnated a 15-year-old.
Jeffs was one of 12 FLDS men charged with crimes including sexual assault and bigamy. The seven prosecuted so far have been convicted and sentenced to prison terms of between six and 75 years.
Former sect member Flora Jessop, who fled an FLDS polygamy family at 16 and wrote a book describing abuses of herself and other children, said the trial offers a rare glimpse into the sect's way of life. Even a conviction of Jeffs won't end the practice of multiple marriages and abuse of children, she said.
"What we want to get out of this trial in large part is awareness to the American people that polygamy is not a non-victimizing culture," she said. "It is absolutely about victimizing women and children."
She said children in FLDS families are stunted emotionally and given little education. "Children want their parents to be heroes," she said. "In polygamy, parents weren't our heroes. They were our boogeymen."
The FLDS has no current connection to the mainstream Mormon Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which renounced polygamy more than a century ago.
Jeffs was first charged more than five years ago, during a crackdown in Arizona and Utah on child marriages, fraud and police misconduct in the isolated twin towns of Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah, where the sect is dominant. He has been in jail since 2006. In 2007, he was found guilty in Utah of rape as an accomplice, but the conviction was overturned.
Laurie Allen, who escaped from a similar polygamist sect as a teen, said Jeffs established the Texas ranch, with a large limestone temple that dominates the flat landscape, in a move to expand church holdings beyond the Arizona-Utah border area as scrutiny there was increasing. Allen is a cousin of Flora Jessop.
"The YFZ ranch in Texas was for the elite — all the pretty little girls, and a few healthy boys to do the chores," Allen said. "That's where the patriarchs are going to pick their future brides from."
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott was in the courtroom for part of the proceedings last week. Spokesman Jerry Strickland said the case is not about polygamy but child abuse: "Our case is about the sexual assault of children. …Warren Jeffs sexually assaulted a 14-year-old and a 12-year-old while at the Yearning for Zion ranch."
Jeffs, who has changed lawyers several times, asked the judge for more time to prepare his own defense. Walther said no.
"The plea of not guilty speaks for itself," Emily Detoto, one of his lawyers, said before being fired.
Jeffs faces a separate trial for bigamy in October.
He said his church has practiced polygamy for five generations and believes it is the will of God and a sacred principle.
"How can we just throw it away and say, 'God has not spoken?'" Jeffs asked.