FLDS want documents found in raid suppressed

SAN ANGELO, Texas — Authorities leveraged a fake abuse claim to justify a massive raid of a polygamist sect's ranch when their true purpose was to persecute an unpopular religious group, attorneys for 10 indicted members of the FLDS Church said Wednesday.

"You were misled," attorney Gerald Goldstein told District Judge Barbara Walther at a hearing on the defendants' motion to suppress evidence seized in the April 2008 raid. Walther issued the search warrant allowing the raid.

Goldstein said an investigator failed to check the veracity of the domestic abuse hot line calls prompting the raid and failed to disclose previous false calls and other information that might have caused Walther to refuse to issue the warrant.

"Omissions rise to the level of misleading if they would affect the court's decision-making," Goldstein said.

State prosecutors said law enforcement had probable cause to search the Yearning For Zion Ranch last year and that the evidence, including documents that list plural and underage marriages and pregnancies among sect girls, should not be suppressed.

Twelve members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints have been indicted on charges including sexual assault of a child and bigamy since the April 2008 raid, in which more than 400 sect children were temporarily swept into custody. The suppression motion covers all but jailed sect leader Warren Jeffs, who awaits trial in Arizona on charges of being accomplice to rape, and a sect member who faces only misdemeanor charges.

Any decision to suppress some of the evidence could hurt the state's case because sect women and girls have been reluctant to testify, even in secret grand jury proceedings.

Assistant Attorney General Eric Nichols, who is handling the prosecution, contested Goldstein's claims. He said law enforcement never doubted there was a young, pregnant girl in danger at the ranch when they requested the search warrant. He also said the defense's claims were irrelevant.

"None of those claimed omissions would have affected any of the probable cause," he said.

Nichols had argued earlier that the defendants didn't have legal standing to challenge the seizure because the ranch is owned by a trust controlled by the church.

The FLDS holds property and goods communally, meaning members share everything.

They do, however, have specific family residences at the 1,700-acre ranch in the west Texas town of Eldorado, and Goldstein said that should be enough to establish the men had a right to expect privacy there.