It looks like the phone call which prompted the FLDS raids was a hoax.
Well, this makes things a little awkward, to say the least.
I’m going to reserve judgment for a bit longer. Doesn’t CPS have 14-year-old girls from the compound who are pregnant? :dubious:
Yeah, they do, but you can bet that the defense will try to use this against the prosecution, even if it doesn’t have any chance of working.
I came into this story late, so I may not know the whole story. But it seems to me that the authorities are doing the best they can with limited resources. They got a call children were being abused. It would have been negligent of them not to look into it. Keep the kids where you know they’ll be safe while they investigate…and let’s keep the investigation moving swiftly yet thoroughly, so if it turns out to be a whole lot of nothing, everyone can go home.
The call was under suspicion from the start, or a least since the the evacuation, because they couldn’t find anyone owning up to it. This doesn’t surprise me.
I hope it doesn’t impact the case, but I can’t see how it could really matter, since when the cops went there, they found actual criminal conditions of child abuse, polygamy and just basically a deeply rank example of religion-as-child-and-spousal-abuse.
(That last part is what really pisses me off about this case…cops and just people in the area in general must have known that there was creepy shit going on in this compound, but they just kinda let it slide until someone complained, because somehow it’s okay to mentally torture women and children and force them into pedophilic marriage if it’s in the name of some imaginary friend in the sky, as long as no one complains. Of course they didn’t complain, these criminal turds made sure they didn’t know there was anything better!)
Even better—FLDS Tipster Arrested for False Report - UPDATE: Is Barack Obama Delagate!?!?!
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I’m absolutely certain this was orchestrated by Obama! 
BZZT! The cops have to have actionable evidence and not merely “everybody knows” evidence. You can’t blame the cops for not going in before this if they didn’t have the necessary evidence. We have laws for a reason, and one of them is to protect people from unjust persecution (and there’s been lots of that in US history).
Now, I can’t say I’m all that upset about the compound being raided, but I’m not saying that we should break the law to protect people, because then we’ll have folks thinking that it’s okay to attack people because someone doesn’t subscribe to the same religious beliefs as they do, or has the wrong color of skin, or belongs to the wrong political party, or some other equally absurd reason.
Why is it being called a ‘hoax’ when it seems to have been factually true?
What part of it was true? The caller claimed to be a specific individual who was “married” to another specific individual against their will. Investigation has shown that this was clearly not the case. The caller was not the person they claimed to be, nor was the person they named as their husband guilty of the charges the caller made against them. The fact that other people may be guilty of such things is meaningless in determining the validity of the phone call.
Yeah, I know you’re right, intellectually. But this type of thing really tries my belief in the tenet that everyone deserves equal protection under the law, when there’s such an obvious victimization of children (and to a lesser degree, of the adult women) by creepy-ass men who used the cloak of religion to brainwash innocent minds and commit sex crimes.
Being an atheist, and therefore firmly in the camp of “this is the only life we will ever have,” it pisses me off to see people swindling other people out of the lives they deserve on this earth, in favor of what I see as an imaginary afterlife “reward.” This causes me to lose my grip a bit at times. But you are right. I’m just glad that they got that cause to check the place out, even if that initial phone call was fake, because there was some messed up crap going on there.
Tuckerfan, I love your posts, and the car you name yourself after (though I think the Lamborghini Countach gives it some pretty serious competition), so I hope you take this the right way.
There was a large, well-known, criminal enterprise going on. That the fuzz used a source that MIGHT be dubious as an excuse to raid the joint doesn’t seem odd, considering that the victims were so heavily brainwashed they didn’t know how to complain, or even that there was such a thing as complaint.
There is a bit of anger in my post, for which I make NO apologies. This whole thing stinks too much of Jonestown and Waco for me to have a good mood.
And I am in NO way a big fan of arbitrary law-enforcement, or even law itself.
AND - how are we so sure this yet-to-be-located source was dubious? Rest assured, the FLDS has lots of lawyers and spinmeisters on-call, 24-7-365. So ANYTHING said to “exonerate” them is instantly suspicious. Moreso, when it’s said a few days after. Those last sentences could be easily construed as “poisoning the well,”… and so what?
To repeat, Tuckerfan, nothing personal. I don’t mean any sarcasm there.
One news story I read somewhere said the hoax caller has made many hoax calls, particularly about Mormons. She even fooled Flora Jessup for a time. I guess it was just a case of ‘getting lucky’ for her- she finally made a call that had a result. A positive one, in my opinion.
I understand actionable evidence and warrants and all that (at least as much as any layperson viewer of bad procedural television shows), and I’ve expressed my frustration before with the “game” aspect of the legal process - that we’re more interested in dotting i’s and crossing t’s and attacking the competency of lawyers than discovering the truth of events. OTOH, I am glad due process is there and prevents cops from searching my car because I wear a Grateful Dead t-shirt.
But it seems that the crime of child abuse is a particularly difficult case to deal with. The fact is that there WAS abuse, as defined by the state, going on. There’s really no dispute about that, at least that I’ve seen. So, if we assume that the warrants and actions were illegal - then what? Do the kids go home? Do the police say, “Oops! Sorry about that - go about your business until we can find a real complainant.”? I can’t imagine that being the case, even with our bizarre legal system.