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KINGMAN, Ariz. - Nearly 53 years after the historic raid that authorities predicted would "wipe out forever" their polygamous community, eight men are set to stand trial for entering plural marriages to underage girls.
The first trial - that of Kelly Fischer, a 39-year-old contractor - begins today in the courthouse where many of their fathers and grandfathers were brought in 1953. The second trial is next week, with others to follow over the next two months.
The trials mark the most concerted effort in decades to prosecute polygamy. As in the past, the subject has been framed by allegations of sexual exploitation and social oppression within the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
This time, however, authorities have adopted a systematic legal approach that contrasts sharply with the predawn raid of Short Creek, now known as Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz.
The faith's leader, Warren S. Jeffs, is a federal fugitive. Its communal property trust is under court oversight. A judge, marshal's deputies and school administrators have been removed from their posts. And a grand jury is looking at the sect.
Now come the trials, sure to keep the FLDS in the public spotlight.
Fischer, like the other men, faces two counts: sexual conduct with a minor and conspiracy to commit sexual conduct with a minor.
In Arizona, polygamy is prohibited in the state Constitution but is not a crime. Mohave County Attorney Matt Smith is enlisting a statute that makes it a class 6 felony to engage in sexual activity with anyone under the age of 18. The charge is punishable by four months to two years in prison, or probation.
The other men are: Dale Evans Barlow, 48; Rodney Hans Holm, 39; Donald Robert Barlow, 49; Vergel Bryce Jessop, 46; Terry Darger Barlow, 24; Randolph J. Barlow, 33; and David Romaine Bateman, 49.
The FLDS sect is a breakoff of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which abandoned polygamy in 1890 after the federal government threatened to confiscate its assets and block a bid for statehood.
But the FLDS are among some 37,000 fundamentalists in the United States and Canada who still hold plural marriage as a religious tenet, based on the teachings of the early Mormon Church, necessary for achieving salvation.
The FLDS have refused to stop plural marriages involving teens, characterizing the pressure to do so as mere interference with a religiously based preference for marriages arranged by their prophet. And that has made Jeffs a target, too.
The lanky, bespectacled 50-year-old is wanted on the same Arizona charges, as well as a Utah count of rape-as-an accomplice for his alleged role in performing underage mar- riages.
Jeffs has not been seen publicly in more than 18 months; on May 6, the FBI placed him on its Ten Most Wanted fugitives list.
And so his eight followers come to court without a public champion, a notable difference from 1953 when former patriarch LeRoy S. Johnson gave a spirited defense of his people even as he was carted off to Kingman.
Still, these men likely see themselves in the same light as their ancestors: martyrs for the cause.
Indeed, past prosecutions have only served to strengthen the faith of the fundamentalists living in the Arizona Strip, who now number between 6,000 and 8,000 despite numerous attempts to eradicate their polygamous community.
Those efforts began in 1935 when the LDS Church excommunicated 21 men in Short Creek, as the twin towns were then known, after they refused to renounce polygamy. State authorities charged three men - Price Johnson, I.C. Spencer and John Y. Barlow - with unlawful cohabitation.
Barlow's case was dismissed; Johnson and Spencer each spent about a year in prison in Florence, Ariz.
A decade later, there was another attempt to rein in the polygamists.
Some 46 adults in Utah, among them men from Short Creek, were charged with unlawful cohabitation; 24 went to state or federal prison.
After seven months, 10 men were freed in exchange for a pledge to abandon polygamy. Among them: Ianthus W. Barlow, Albert E. Barlow, Joseph L. Jessop, John Y. Barlow, David B. Darger and Alma A. Timpson.
Four men refused to sign the oath, including Charles F. Zitting, father of current Hildale Mayor David Zitting, and spent 31 months in jail.
Once again, the prosecutions did little to curb polygamy in Short Creek.
By 1953, Arizona Gov. Howard R. Pyle was determined to eradicate the polygamous community, spurred to action by allegations of child brides, tax fraud and a communal lifestyle that, in his words, turned members into indentured slaves.
On July 26, more than 100 law officers and social workers descended on the "morals cult" at Short Creek.
They jailed 39 men in Kingman; 86 women and 263 children were placed in state custody, where most remained for two years.
Arizona Attorney General Ross W. Jones boasted he could see "no reason why as a result of this raid the community will not be wiped out forever."
By December, unlawful cohabitation charges against 27 men had been reduced to minor conspiracy offenses. A Mohave County judge placed the men on probation, fearing that sending them to prison would make them martyrs. Still, prosecutor Paul La Prade claimed with unbridled confidence that "Organized polygamist activity no longer exists in Arizona."
By then, the raid had become an embarrassment to Arizona, described by the Arizona Republic as a "Keystone Kops" affair akin to "the hated police-state roundups of the Old World."
Public criticism chilled government enthusiasm for prosecuting polygamy in the twin towns until 1998, when authorities took up a more selective approach.
Utah successfully prosecuted FLDS member Rodney Holm, a former police officer, for his spiritual marriage to Ruth Stubbs when she was 16. The Utah Supreme Court recently upheld Holm's conviction.
Activists and the public applauded that effort. And that gave Mohave County Investigator Gary Engels, who developed the new cases, a blueprint to follow.
Jeffs helped, too, perhaps inadvertently.
After becoming prophet in 2002, he purged dozens of men from the FLDS faith - many of whom are now working hand-in-hand with state authorities.
Michael Quinn, a historian and scholar of Mormon fundamentalism, said today cohabitation is so common that enforcing laws against polygamy based on that standard would go nowhere. That is acknowledged by Utah and Arizona authorities in their refusal to go after consenting adults for polygamy.
But societal norms also have changed regarding the age of consent and marriage; the FLDS standard has not, Quinn said. And arranged marriages have never been widely accepted in the United States.
"That is something that Americans are not generally going to respond to well - religious leaders determining who marries and who doesn't marry. When you link that with underage girls, the hostility is doubled," Quinn said.
Still, Engels is circumspect about what may be accomplished in these hearings. Engels concedes that evidence, not public sentiment, will be required in court.
"I don't know what kind of success we're going to have," Engels said. "At least we've tried to do something."