Dependable Erection

Friday, April 18, 2008

He shoulda said God told him to

Oklahoma sheriff charged with using inmates as sex slaves
Authorities have charged a western Oklahoma sheriff with coercing and bribing female inmates so he could use them in a sex-slave operation run out of his jail.

Custer County Sheriff Mike Burgess resigned Wednesday just as state prosecutors filed 35 felony charges against him, including 14 counts of second-degree rape, seven counts of forcible oral sodomy and five counts of bribery by a public official.

Burgess, the top officer in the county of 26,000 since 1994, appeared in court Wednesday was released after posting $50,000 bail.

"We are stunned," Undersheriff Kenneth Tidwell said Thursday.

Attorney Steve Huddleston said that he has not had a chance to review all the allegations against his client, but that "Mr. Burgess is anxious to go to court and clear his name."

Among other things, Burgess is accused of having sex with a female drug court participant who was in his custody. The crimes are to have occurred between October 2005 and April 2007.

A federal lawsuit filed in October claims Burgess told one drug court participant he would have her sent to prison if she didn't comply with his sexual demands.

Because if he was doing it as part of his religion, that would be OK:
"When the prophet decided they were to be married – and no age is too young – they would be married, and they wanted to have as many babies as they could." said Child Protective Services supervisor Angie Voss, who testified for several hours during a marathon child custody hearing in San Angelo. "The boy children, the girl children, the male adults, the female adults, this is their belief."

. . .

She said one girl said she hadn't seen her mother in two years and told her that Merrill Jessop, the ranch leader, said it was "none of her business" where her mother was.

She also said that children reported that they were happy to be at the ranch and that some of them had come from Arizona and Utah, not always with their parents.

Among the complicating factors in Ms. Voss' investigation has been determining which children belonged to which parents – tangles that still have yet to be worked out.

"If a father fell out of favor in some way, his wives would be reassigned to another man and he would become their father, so the children moved to different houses," she said.

The children were "not at all upset by that," Ms. Voss said.

. . .

Under questioning, Sgt. Crawford revealed some details about the ranch families – including at least one case of a 46-year-old man being married to a 17-year-old girl. There was no evidence of whether she had a child listed on the forms and nothing to indicate she'd been married illegally.

One attorney asked Sgt. Crawford how many others were listed in the documents.

"Whoo," Sgt. Crawford exclaimed in a deep drawl from the stand, to chuckles in the courtroom, as he shuffled the papers in his hand. "Well sir, right here there's 14 on this one. I believe [one of the fathers] had eight or nine. There's one over here with 22. They're shown as wives."

The files were incomplete. They didn't show birth dates, and they didn't delineate the relationships between the children and the mothers – only the husbands and the wives.

The names Sgt. Crawford read from some of the papers indicated the unusual culture and, in some cases, the confusion surrounding some of the families and their relationships. The hundreds of children had only a handful of last names – Jessop, Jeffs, Johnson and Steed being among the most common.



As i commented over at Claire's place last week, i don't believe that anyone will be convicted of anything in this case. If God tells you, as a middle aged man, that you should fuck a lot of teenage girls and keep them pregnant, what right does the state have to intervene? It's right there in the Constitution, isn't it? Isn't that what freedom of religion is all about?

Labels:

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home