Emily Ramshaw at the Texas Tribune is reporting that jurors have returned a guilty verdict in the first trial of the 12 members of the FLDS sect charged with underage marriages. If the 12 men are all found guilty, the state’s handling of this case will have to be re-evaluated. Katy Vine suggested as much in her story last month:

If the plan all along has been to take aim at the problem of bigamy and underage marriage within the FLDS from a criminal angle instead of through civil proceedings, one can only imagine that the attorney general is holding his breath as the criminal trials get under way. (Perhaps he is also counting on additional convictions from an ongoing federal investigation regarding violations of the Mann Act and the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.)