Eldorado, Texas » A Schleicher County jury took about two hours to find a polygamous sect member guilty of sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl in 2004.

Raymond Merril Jessop, 38, stood as 51st District Judge Barbara Walther read the verdict reached by the seven men and five women who heard the case. He was immediately handcuffed and escorted across a lawn by at least four law officers to the Schleicher County Jail to await sentencing on Monday.

Jessop did not react as the verdict was read. As he left the courtroom he gave a slight smile and nodded his head at six FLDS members seated in the audience.

None of the attorneys would comment until a sentencing phase concludes Monday.

Willie Jessop, spokesman for the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, also declined comment.

The jury will decide on a sentence after hearing additional witness testimony on Monday. Jessop's attorneys will likely push for probation, something they asked jurors about during the selection process.

The second-degree felony crime is punishable by two to 20 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

As the jury returned to the courtroom for the verdict, one of the original 12 jurors -- a woman whose husband served as foreman of the grand jury that indicted Jessop -- wasn't among the group. An alternate juror had been substituted in the missing woman's place. Court Clerk Peggy Williams

The grand jury indicted Jessop last summer based on evidence gathered during an April 2008 investigation at the Yearning For Zion Ranch, located about three miles from the courthouse. The ranch is home to FLDS members.

The state's investigation was triggered by a call now acknowledged as a hoax but Walther ruled in September that evidence was taken legally from the ranch.

The jurors, selected from a pool of 300 county residents, heard a week's worth of testimony.

The state used birth records, a marriage certificate and FLDS church records to show Jessop, already married, took the girl as a spiritual wife in 2004 when she was 15.

She conceived a child several months later and gave birth to a daughter in August 2005. DNA experts testified there was virtually no doubt that Jessop is the child's father.

Prosecutor Eric Nichols told jurors Thursday in his closing argument that the best evidence that Jessop was guilty of sexual assault is that child, whose face was projected on a screen during his remarks.

The girl, now four, is the "snow on the ground, the pools of water on the ground, that represents the terrible crime of sexual assault," said Nichols, who used a storm metaphor to validate the state's reliance on circumstantial evidence.

Nichols pointed at Jessop repeatedly as he tried to seal jurors' opinions, reminding them of the DNA tests that had so many 9s he couldn't keep track of them all. There also was corroborating evidence that confirmed the test results, he said.

Earlier Thursday, jurors heard testimony from Texas Ranger Nick Hanna about dictations made by FLDS leader Warren S. Jeffs' that discussed Jessop's marriage to the victim, now 21; three-day labor in August 2005; the name bestowed on the baby; and Jessop's assignments at the ranch.

Nichols said the state did not have to prove an exact date for the sexual assault under Texas law, only that the crime occurred before Jessop was indicted in July 2008 and before a statute of limitations expired.

"Common sense, common experience" provided an estimate that it occurred on or about Nov. 19, 2004, he said.

"Children are our most precious resource and we would never impose on a child the responsibility associated with consenting to being placed in a spiritual marriage . . . much less consenting to an act of sexual violence," he said.

The defense objected to much of the state's evidence on constitutional grounds and tried to raise doubt with the jury about the DNA test linking Jessop to the victim's child.

Defense attorneys Mark Stevens and Brandon T. Hudson told jurors the state did not prove the "most obvious" element of the charge: that Jessop was in Schleicher County, let alone at the ranch, at the time the crime was alleged to have occurred.

Stevens called the trial a "paper case" and said there was no evidence that Jessop ever saw, contributed to or commented on documents, such as the dictations, the state seized from a locked vault in a Temple Annex at the ranch.

"It's dangerous when we start trying to convict people on documents and we're not sure where the documents came from," Stevens said.

"Can you guess a man into a guilty verdict?" he asked, then added that despite the state's huge mass of documents, "it is not proof of a crime."

Hudson told jurors the state "didn't bring you what you need."

"There is not one piece of evidence in that entire box, on all those computers, in that DNA [that tells you] where Raymond was" in November 2004, he said.

But Nichols, who gave the final statement to the jury, said the state's allegations weren't a paper case at all but one "based in flesh and blood" -- that of the child and her mother.

"Crimes that are committed behind locked metal gates and fences and walls are just the same kind of crimes that occur out on the street corner," Nichols said.

The important thing is that law officers are able to get whatever evidence they can to bring to jurors, he said, to address serious crime.

Jessop was one of 12 men indicted by the grand jury last summer. Walther has scheduled their trials one after another over the next year. Allen E. Keate is scheduled to stand trial beginning Dec. 7 on the same charge Jessop faced -- sexual assault of a child.

A man who stopped a reporter in the parking lot of the county complex to ask if the jury had reached a verdict responded with just one word when told the outcome.

"Good," he said.