Good to the Last Strip Non-Prophet
A ringside seat at the surpassingly strange sexual assault trial of Warren Jeffs, who probably wishes he’d never come to Texas.
frogprof says: "Had he ever asked a group of women to come to him and lay prostrate on the floor before him?" I really expect better grammar from a Texas Monthly writer -- and do you not have any editors or copyreaders "laying" around? The story was fascinating, but egregious "mistakes" like this can change my entire opinion about a publication. (September 23rd, 2011 at 4:30pm)
It was the first day after jury selection in Warren Jeffs’ sexual assault trial, and Deric Walpole, the head of the defense team, seemed nervous. Tyhis was understandable, given the circumstances. Jeffs, the prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), had discharged his court-appointed attorney in January, hired a Fort Worth hotshot named Jeff Kearney soon after, and dismissed Kearney abruptly in early July. Then, on July 20, only five days before jury selection was scheduled to begin at the Tom Green County courthouse in San Angelo, he retained Walpole, a compact, burly man with a thick goatee from the McKinney firm of Luce, Nordhaus, and Walpole.
Walpole spent much of that first day begging Judge Barbara Walther for a continuance. “I’ve been working twenty, twenty-one hours a day, and I’m still not ready,” he explained. “Things are moving even quicklier—quicker—than originally projected.” The prosecutor, Eric Nichols, sighed and countered that Jeffs had not only had plenty of time to hire counsel but had retained several highly qualified attorneys, a few of whom were sitting by Walpole’s side. One member of Walpole’s team, who had a brace on his left middle finger, just happened to be casually flexing his injured digit during the argument.
Walpole’s motion was denied, which turned out not to matter much. The next morning he announced, “Mr. Jeffs has released all defense attorneys of record and wishes to address the court.”
“Mr. Jeffs, proceed,” said Judge Walther, with an air that seemed to acknowledge that order and decorum were edging their way toward the exit.
Jeffs slowly stood up to make what would be his first-ever public speech. As a courtroom of people craned their necks to get a good view of him, the wood benches creaked. Jeffs is a tall, thin man, and he was dressed on that day in a dark suit and sensible black shoes. His graying hair was cut short, and he stooped over as if, at age 55, he’d had an early onset of osteoporosis. With his hands folded in front of his waist, he began speaking in a slow, deep, nasal monotone. “I have released all my counsel. I desire to represent myself,” he said. He paused for a few seconds. “And I would like my own motion.” Again, he paused. “I have prepared a writing of the court. I have signed this writing if the court will allow it to be presented.” Walpole passed Jeffs’s writing to the bailiff, and the judge obligingly accepted the papers. She waited a long time, growing impatient, and finally asked, “What else, sir?”
Jeffs started up again as if someone had released a pause button. “Present a motion before this court in a manner in the defense needed pertaining this case,” he said. Repeating awkward phrases strung together in a halting fashion, he mentioned requiring a “greater understanding” for “truth to be preserved.” For “true justice” to be served, he said, he needed a “full defense.” (A schoolteacher seated beside me leaned over and said, “That is not proper English.”)
When Jeffs finished, Walther pulled off her reading glasses and called a recess. Some local ladies in their sixties started whispering to one another. “This is unreal,” one said. “Oh, God,” said another. Nichols, like a boxer who suddenly found himself in the ring with an improvisational dancer, was unsure where to look or what to do. Jeffs’s lawyers quickly gravitated toward the back of the room to confer with one another. I asked Kearney, who had been fired days before but had not been withdrawn by the court, if anything like this had ever happened to him before. It was a dumb question. “No,” he said.
The trial resumed an hour later. Judge Walther asked Jeffs to reconsider his decision. When he refused, she insisted that one of his attorneys remain as “stand-by counsel” in the gallery, a job left for Walpole, with assistance from a well-manicured young Houston lawyer named Emily Detoto. The others, Walther said, could go if they wished. They did, practically leaving skid marks on the courthouse lawn.
Going full steam ahead, Nichols buttoned his suit coat and began his opening argument. A trim, bald man with an unflappable style, he had recently left his position as Texas’s deputy attorney general for criminal justice to go into private practice, but he had stayed on the case to see it through, backed up by a handful of associates. In a methodical manner, he told the jury that in charge one, the aggravated sexual assault of a twelve-year-old, they would hear an audiotape of the incident, and in charge two, the sexual assault of a fifteen-year-old, they would see evidence that a child was conceived. Both assaults, he explained, had occurred at the FLDS’s Yearning for Zion Ranch, in Eldorado, 45 minutes south of San Angelo. Holding up charts explaining the relevant Texas penal code sections, he was somber and unemotional. He never raised his voice, and when he was done, he simply walked back to his chair and sat down.
Throughout the presentation, Jeffs sat silently in his chair, alone at his long, wooden table, staring down as if he were examining the world’s slowest-moving beetle. As the day went on, Nichols questioned witnesses and displayed evidence: documents and digital media seized from the YFZ Ranch, DNA samples, public records. Each time he placed an item on Jeffs’s table, he would wait fifteen seconds, then take it away, without a word from Jeffs.
It was surprising, then, when Jeffs finally offered an objection—somewhat randomly—the next day. Not a brief one, either. It lasted more than an hour and would prove to be the longest speech of the entire proceeding. After an FBI agent named John Broadway authenticated a chart listing the members of Jeffs’s extended family, Jeffs rose from his seat.
“There is a sacred trust drawn by religious leadership,” he exclaimed, “not to be touched by government agencies. . . . This is a standard objection . . . on the basis of religious freedom.” And so on. A half hour in, just when he seemed to be flagging, he caught a second wind, becoming animated, breaking his monotone, and actually addressing the jury. “I am the fifth generation born into plural marriage,” he said. “How can we throw it away and say our forefathers were wrong—who went to prison for these very principles?” It seemed like an apt ending to his speech, but Jeffs carried on. Some of the jurors appeared to feel sorry for him, yet even their interest seemed to wane at about the 45-minute mark. Fifteen minutes later, Jeffs ended with an “Amen.” Taking that as his cue, Nichols stood up and began, “I think I state the obvious—”
“May I say one more thing?” Jeffs interrupted. Nichols sat back down, deflated, and the jury was graced with about fifteen more minutes of material.
This was hardly Jeffs’s only notable performance of the day. Later, while the jury was on break, he pulled some paperwork out of a manila envelope and recited a purported revelation from God. “I, the Lord God of heaven, call upon the court to now cease this persecution against my holy way,” he boomed. “Let it stop now!” He sent a scourge “upon the prosecutorial zeal, to be humbled by sickness and death.” When the judge instructed him not to have an outburst in front of the jury or imply they might be in danger, Jeffs replied quietly, “I am relaying a message.”
“Well, don’t relay the message,” Walther said tersely. “Bring the jury in.
When the trial was over, it seemed like it had been a strange dream. Over the course ten days, the state presented an overwhelming case, an avalanche of evidence revealing the inner workings of a secretive religious sect that has quietly practiced polygamy throughout North America for more than one hundred years. (The mainstream Mormon church, from which the FLDS descended, abandoned the practice in 1890.) The decision by the group’s prophet to represent himself was odd enough. But the sermons, the interminable silences, and the revelations from the Lord—not to mention the horrific evidence itself—made for one of the most bizarre trials in U.S. history.
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