U.S. Supreme Court urged to deny polygamist's appeal

The Utah Attorney General's Office is urging the U.S. Supreme Court to reject an appeal of a polygamist convicted of bigamy.

Rodney Holm was convicted in 2003 in St. George's 5th District Court of bigamy and unlawful sex with a 16-year-old stemming from his marriage, when he was 32, to his sister-in-law. The Utah Supreme Court last year upheld his conviction, and he appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The sister-in-law, Ruth Stubbs, had asked Fundamentalist LDS Church leader Rulon Jeffs that she be allowed to marry someone else. Jeffs told her to marry Holm.

"This case does not involve consenting adults," assistant Utah Attorney General Laura Dupaix wrote in a brief filed with the high court on Friday.

"Ruth 'just cried' when she heard Jeffs's pronouncement, but agreed to marry (Holm)," Dupaix wrote. "Within 24 hours, she and (Holm) were married in a private, unlicensed religious ceremony in Jeffs's Hildale, Utah home."

Jeffs died in 2002. He was the father of Warren Jeffs, who currently faces charges of rape as an accomplice for arranging a child-bride marriage.

In the petition for the U.S. Supreme Court to consider overturning Holm's conviction, lawyers raised questions about private polygamous relationships among consenting adults and freedom of religion.

Dupaix argued that because Holm married Stubbs when she was 16, many of the questions cannot be answered because she was a minor. On the issue of religious freedom, the Utah Attorney General's Office urged the Supreme Court to deny the appeal "because it does not raise an issue of widespread national importance. Nor is this case a suitable vehicle for addressing these claims."

Holm's attorney has 10 days to respond. The U.S. Supreme Court would then decide if it will take up the polygamy issue. More than a century has passed since the high court issued an opinion upholding a ban on plural marriage, in the controversial Reynolds vs. United States case in 1879.

---

E-mail: bwinslow@desnews.com