Mark Shurtleff: Attorney general tackles Utah's toughest issues

But shortly after Shurtleff took office, Tom Green began to turn up on national TV talk shows boasting of his polygamist lifestyle. He was flaunting it, rubbing it in the faces of prosecutors and the law. Juab County wanted to prosecute but didn't have the funds. Shurtleff provided funding and investigators, who were surprised by what they found.

"Did you know Green married his wife when she was 13?" they asked their boss. "And that this practice is widespread?"

Shurtleff had stumbled upon a practical way to take on polygamy; it was one thing if men were taking multiple wives to live their religion — even if it was against the law, nobody wanted to take on religion. But sex with minors was another matter.

"We wanted to get him for child rape," says Shurtleff, "and there was a baby to prove it."

Shurtleff met with county prosecutors and offered to let them have the first crack at prosecuting polygamists on the rape charges. They declined. It was a political hot potato, especially for prosecutors in Washington County, where polygamists constitute a large voting block.

It fell to Shurtleff to prosecute. A group of polygamists from Hildale met with Shurtleff to try to head him off. "We think this is a gray area," they told him. His reply: "No, this is a crime, and you'd better stop. I'm going to prosecute every case."

Later, law enforcement officials discovered recordings of polygamist meetings in which one leader, Warren Jeffs of the Fundamentalist LDS Church, told them to destroy records and photographs of weddings that showed children marrying adults.

Says Shurtleff, "We had to make the choice early on: Is this about polygamy or is this about crimes being committed in a polygamous sect in the name of religion? We chose the crimes, the more serious of the two. This was child abuse — we didn't want to be accused of religious persecution. And it was practical. If you prosecuted one polygamist for polygamy, where do you stop? You can't prosecute 20,000 people."

Shurtleff's resolve grew with each victim's story. Carolyn Jessop, who was married to Jeffs' No. 2 man, escaped with her eight children in the middle of the night. She sat in Shurtleff's office and told him stories of children being forced to kill animals with their bare hands to demonstrate obedience, of children being forced to quit school, of women being told that they don't need a job or an education because their only purpose is to marry and please their husband and have babies; of economic hardships and women having no way out of polygamy.