Those Texas Officials just can't stand to lose. So they will be able to keep those kids for some more weeks.
The New York Times
May 22, 2008
Texas Seeks Stay of Polygamy Sect Custody Ruling
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
HOUSTON — The custody battle over 468 children seized from the ranch of a polygamist sect moved to the Texas Supreme Court on Friday, with the state insisting that the children were too endangered by sexual and emotional abuse to be returned to their families.
The Third Court of Appeals in Austin had ruled unanimously Thursday that a district judge had unlawfully allowed the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to remove the children from their Eldorado homes on insufficient evidence that they were in immediate danger.
But arguing that the children were indeed threatened, the state on Friday sought a reversal from Texas’s highest court, and also asked for an emergency order allowing the state to retain custody of the children while the nine justices considered the appeal.
The state brief called the appeals decision “a poor analysis of misstated facts” and said the court “committed a basic and fundamental critical error” in ignoring what was “prudent and cautious” in the state’s approach to protecting the children.
The Supreme Court did not grant the stay, keeping in place the appeals court order that the district judge, Barbara Walther, vacate her rulings giving the state custody. But the justices called for the case record and prepared to deliberate over the holiday weekend, said a court spokesman, Ostler McCarthy.
In a separate development on Friday, 12 children from four families were temporarily returned to their homes under an agreement with the state after a habeas corpus hearing in Bexar County, said Rod Parker, a lawyer from Salt Lake City and spokesman for the families.
The seizures of the children and their placement in foster homes around the state followed a raid last month in West Texas at the Yearning for Zion ranch of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a breakaway sect that split from the Mormon church after the Mormons repudiated plural marriage.
The unanimous ruling by three judges of the Third Court of Appeals in Austin revoked the state’s custody over the children of 38 mothers and, by extension, almost certainly the rest, for what it called a lack of evidence that they were in immediate danger of sexual or physical abuse.
The court said the record did “not reflect any reasonable effort on the part of the department to ascertain if some measure short of removal and/or separation would have eliminated the risk.”
It said that the evidence of danger to the children “was legally and factually insufficient” to justify the removal and that the lower court had “abused its discretion” in failing to return the children to the families.
Custody hearings under way before five judges in San Angelo were canceled.
Susan Hays, a lawyer in Dallas who specializes in appellate law and who is the lawyer for a 2-year-old taken from the ranch, said the children might begin returning home as early as next week.
“Right now, there is an order saying return the children,” Ms. Hays said. “It technically does not apply to all the women’s children. But practically it does.”
She said the state would have to file a motion for emergency release quickly that asks the court to stay the order.
“If they don’t,” Ms. Hays said, “then we’re done. The children could be returned as soon as next week, or not depending on what happens with the high court.”
The case began on April 3, when Texas investigators, saying they were responding to a girl’s call for help, raided the 1,691-acre Yearning for Zion ranch, about 45 miles south of San Angelo.
The caller was never found, and investigators now suspect that the call was a hoax. |
