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A judge threw out a lawsuit Wednesday against polygamous leader Warren Jeffs that claimed the sect's longtime Utah law firm created a veneer that helped perpetuate abuses like child labor and underage marriage.
U.S. District Judge Ted Stewart decided representing Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints leaders doesn't make lawyers responsible for alleged misdeeds of the secretive group based along the Utah-Arizona border.
He also found many of the claims are too old to be decided in court, ruling Snow, Christensen and Martineau's representation was common knowledge even for members forbidden from contact with the outside world.
A lawyer for more than 20 ex-members of the group, Brett Godfrey, said he's looking over the order and weighing a possible appeal.
The ex-members had said the well-known Salt Lake City firm burnished the group's credentials as a maligned religious group as cover for crimes like Jeffs' increasing use of underage marriage.
They claimed attorneys paid with money earned from child labor helped Jeffs devise legal strategies for tightening his control over the group after he took over leadership from his father in the late 1990s.
Jeffs used that power to marry and sexually assault underage girls as well as arrange other underage marriages in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the suit says.
The firm has denied the allegations it called "utterly nonsensical," saying lawyers like Rod Parker were simply doing their jobs and can't be held responsible for anything Jeffs did.
It strongly denied being involved with anything illegal and condemned the wrongs the plaintiffs say they suffered under Jeffs, including being forced into marriage and separated from their families. Snow, Christensen and Martineau no longer represents Jeffs or the group, but Wednesday's ruling shows their dealings were always ethical, said their lawyer Brent Hatch.
Jeffs is serving a life prison sentence in Texas after being convicted of sexually assaulting girls he considered wives. He no longer has a lawyer, and the group doesn't have a phone number to contact for comment.
The lawsuit came as the federal government wages fights on multiple fronts to rein in the Jeffs-led group with cases in both Utah and Arizona.
Jurors in Phoenix found that the twin polygamous towns violated the rights of nonbelievers by denying them basic services such as police protection, and a judge in Utah found that children in the group were forced to work long hours, sometimes with little food, at a pecan farm in 2012.
Several members of the group have also agreed to plea deals in a multimillion-dollar food-stamp fraud scheme. Leader Lyle Jeffs is on the run after escaping home confinement in that case.