No charges filed against members of Canadian polygamous colony

Canadian prosecutors have decided not to file any criminal charges against members of a polygamous colony in British Columbia that has Utah ties.

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"In my view, there is not a substantial likelihood of conviction with respect to any of the proposed counts," special prosecutor Richard Peck wrote in a summary of his report presented today to British Columbia's Ministry of Attorney General.

Peck was tasked to investigate whether criminal charges should be filed against members of the community of Bountiful, British Columbia. The community is made up of members of the Fundamentalist LDS Church, which is based on the Utah-Arizona border, and a group who split off from them shortly after FLDS leader Warren Jeffs took power.

In the report, Peck said he looked at Canada's polygamy laws, as well as other sexual and marriage related offenses.

"There is no substantial likelihood of conviction," Peck wrote. "In any event, these other offenses do not address the core of the problem."

Polygamy, Peck said, is the root of the problem.

"Polygamy is the underlying phenomenon from which all the other alleged harms flow, and the public interest would best be served by addressing it directly," he wrote. "There is a substantial body of scholarship supporting the position that polygamy is socially harmful."

The special prosecutor recommended that British Columbia's Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada take up the polygamy issue and whether plural marriage is protected by the nation's Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

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