Polygamist Jeffs gets life in prison
Guilty of assaulting two child brides
SAN ANGELO, Texas – Polygamist leader Warren Jeffs recorded everything he said. Thousands of pages, written with Biblical flourish, about God wanting him to take 12-year-old wives. About those girls needing to sexually please him. About men he banished for not building his temple fast enough.
Facing his last chance to keep his freedom, Jeffs didn’t say a word.
He was sentenced to life in prison Tuesday for sexually assaulting one of his child brides – among 24 underage wives prosecutors said Jeffs collected – and received the maximum 20-year punishment on a separate child sex conviction. Jeffs, 55, will not be eligible for parole until he is at least 100 years old.
The head of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints made no plea for leniency.
Less than half an hour later, jurors returned with the harshest punishment possible.
“He’s a pervert, and the crazy thing is, he perverted his own religion,” his sister, Elaine Jeffs, said after the sentencing. Nearby, police escorted her brother into a waiting patrol car.
Elaine Jeffs, who left the FLDS in 1984, watched the end to an often bizarre and graphic two-week trial. Other onlookers included one of Jeffs’ top lieutenants and state caseworkers who rounded up nearly 400 children during a 2008 raid at the sect’s Texas ranch. Despite the convictions and life sentence, Jeffs remains in control of the FLDS and its roughly 10,000 followers. His most devoted consider him God’s spokesman on Earth and a prophet.
The FLDS is a radical offshoot of mainstream Mormonism and believes polygamy brings exaltation in heaven. In closing arguments, prosecutors rejected the idea that the sect had been targeted.
“The evidence in this case shows that this isn’t a prosecution of a people,” prosecutor Eric Nichols said. “This is a prosecution to protect people.”
During the trial, prosecutors used DNA evidence to show Jeffs fathered a child with a 15-year-old girl and played an audio recording of what they said was him sexually assaulting a 12-year-old.
“If the world knew what I was doing, they would hang me from the highest tree,” Jeffs wrote in 2005, according to one of his journals.