TX Supreme Court weighs in

The state has ruled and the results are in. However, checkout my highlighted excerpts below! This is far from over!


Texas high court: Removal of sect kids 'not warranted'
http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/05/29/texas.polygamists/?iref=hpmostpop

Excerpts

The Texas Supreme Court agreed with a lower court's ruling, that the state's Child Protective Services division did not present ample evidence that the children were being abused.

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It's unlikely the children will be returned to their homes soon, because it's unclear which child belongs to which parent. A DNA testing order by the district court is incomplete.

And even if the children do return to the YFZ Ranch, the case may not be over. The justices noted that Texas law gives the district court "broad authority to protect children short of separating them from their parents and placing them in foster care."

Examples of those conditions might be a court order saying a child must remain in a certain geographical area or an order removing an alleged perpetrator from the child's home, the district court said.

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In the Texas Supreme Court decision, the three dissenting justices said in an attached opinion that they agreed that the state had no right to remove the young boys from the ranch but that the district court did not err in electing to remove pubescent girls from the ranch and keep them in state custody.

The pubescent girls are "demonstrably endangered," Justice Harriet O'Neill wrote.

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Texas attorney Barbara Elias-Perciful supported the state in her filing. She has been a guardian ad litem -- an attorney representing children's interests -- in child protection cases for 16 years and is also the director of Texas Lawyers for Children.

"This case involves the systematic rape of minor children -- conduct that is institutionalized and euphemistically called 'spiritual marriage,'" she wrote. "Typically, there is no media coverage of the horrific acts sexual predators commit against children ... if the media showed the actual events of adult males demanding sex with 11-year-old girls, there would be no one questioning the graphic danger of returning these children to their home at this time."