{"id":2611,"date":"2008-05-23T12:02:18","date_gmt":"2008-05-23T17:02:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2611"},"modified":"2008-05-23T12:02:18","modified_gmt":"2008-05-23T17:02:18","slug":"bureaucrats-gone-wild","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2611","title":{"rendered":"Bureaucrats Gone Wild!"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was almost a quarter of a century ago when an overzealous (in retrospect) county attorney, Kathleen Morris, offered an arrested sex offender a deal if he started naming names, and ended up indicting dozens people in Jordan Minnesota<\/a> – a small farm town that’s since become an exurb, southwest of Minneapolis – in what turned out to be a Crucible-<\/em>like witchhunt\u00a0on the basis of a jailhouse snitch and testimony from children that turned out to be conjured up from imagination.<\/p>\n

Lives and reputations were destroyed.\u00a0 Lawyers made millions.\u00a0 Antonin Scalia cited the case in Maryland Vs. Craig<\/a><\/em> as an example of how vital the sixth amendment right to question ones’ accuser is in protecting the innocent – in the Jordan case, protecting them from overzealous prosecutors and dubious investigative techniques.<\/p>\n

You’d think the bureaucracy would learn.<\/p>\n

Well, no.\u00a0 You would not<\/a>, if you knew how government works. \u00a0A state appeals court has overturned the seizure of the children from the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints compound:<\/p>\n

The Third Court of Appeals<\/span> in Austin said the state failed to show the youngsters were in any immediate danger, the only grounds in Texas law for taking children from their parents without court action.<\/p>\n

It was not clear when the children \u2014 now scattered in foster homes across the state \u2014 might be returned to their parents. The ruling gave a lower-court judge 10 days to release the youngsters from custody, but the state could appeal to the Texas Supreme Court<\/span> and block that.<\/p>\n

The decision in one of the biggest child-custody cases in U.S. history was a humiliating defeat for the state Child Protective Services agency<\/span>. It was hailed as vindication by members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints<\/span>, who claimed they were being persecuted for their religious beliefs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now if the FCLS broke any laws – and some of the allegations look pretty seriously – then let’s look forward to some serious consequences.<\/p>\n

Child-protection officials argued that five girls at the ranch had become pregnant at 15 and 16 and that the sect pushed underage girls<\/span> into marriage and sex with older men<\/span> and groomed boys to enter into such unions when they grew up.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But we have due process for a reason:<\/p>\n

But the appeals court said the state acted too hastily in sweeping up all the children and taking them away on an emergency basis without going to court first.<\/p>\n

“Even if one views the FLDS belief system as creating a danger of sexual abuse by grooming boys to be perpetrators of sexual abuse and raising girls to be victims of sexual abuse<\/span> … there is no evidence that this danger is ‘immediate’ or ‘urgent’,” the court said.<\/p>\n

“Evidence that children raised in this particular environment may someday have their physical health and safety threatened is not evidence that the danger is imminent enough to warrant invoking the extreme measure of immediate removal.”<\/p>\n

The court said the state failed to show that any more than five of the teenage girls were being sexually abused, and offered no evidence of sexual or physical abuse against the other children. Half the youngsters taken from the ranch were 5 or younger. Only a few dozen are teenage girls<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0Of course, the stories of child protective services’ officers jumping into cases too zealously – and there are many – are balanced by the stories of CPS officials not working fast enough.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was almost a quarter of a century ago when an overzealous (in retrospect) county attorney, Kathleen Morris, offered an arrested sex offender a deal if he started naming names, and ended up indicting dozens people in Jordan Minnesota – a small farm town that’s since become an exurb, southwest of Minneapolis – in what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime-and-punishment","category-family-law"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2611"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2611\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}