Texas Supreme Court Rules Children Removed Illegally!

AUSTIN — The state illegally removed more than 400 children from their parents last month after raiding a polygamist sect's West Texas ranch, the Texas Supreme Court said today.


The decision was a stunning victory for a group of the mothers who were represented by legal aid attorneys in their challenge of the largest custody case in Texas history.

And it will make it much more difficult for child welfare authorities to continue their investigation into whether children were abused on the remote compound owned by members of a breakaway Mormon group known for its polygamist practices.
Although the appeals decided today involved only 129 children, it is expected to apply to all of the children because of a San Angelo judge's global order last month that gave the state broad custody of minors taken from the Yearning for Zion Ranch near Eldorado.

The legal roller coaster started May 22 when the 3rd Court of Appeals in Austin ruled that state District Judge Barbara Walther exceeded her authority in ordering into foster care every child who resided at the Yearning for Zion Ranch, not just the teenage girls who child welfare officials said were at risk of being sexually abused by marriages to older men.

Lawyers for the mothers argued that treating all the children who lived at the compound as one household was wrong.

"Instead of focusing on whether each parent engaged in or tolerated the sexual abuse of their children, the (state) put their entire religion on trial," they said in papers filed at the high court.

The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services had argued that if the children were released from state care because of the ruling, their mothers likely would take refuge in the sect's home turf on the Utah-Arizona border, and the children would be "at risk of continuing sexual and emotional abuse."

The agency's lawyers also argued that without the children, due to the "conspiracy of silence and obfuscation of the alleged mothers," state authorities would be "unable to identify and remove the sexual predators who impregnated numerous underage children at the YFZ Ranch."

Lawyers for the group of 40 mothers who won at the 3rd Court said the state failed to produce evidence of the children's risk, and they should be returned immediately.

''Right now these children are experiencing the irreparable harm, pain and distress of enforced separation from their parents (and, in many cases, siblings),'' the mothers said in their brief to the Supreme Court.

The state argued that there was sufficient evidence to show a culture where adult men commanded sex from underage children while adult women knowingly allowed such abuse. The department said it did the best it could "under difficult, time-sensitive and unprecedented circumstances to protect children on an emergency basis."

Lawyers for the state added that it would be premature to return children without giving Judge Walther the opportunity to determine which parents are entitled to possess which children, relationships that are supposed to be established through extensive DNA testing.

That argument is disingenuous, the mothers said.

"The Department cannot scatter hundreds of children -- including infants and toddlers -- to the four winds and then complain that it cannot put the pieces of the puzzle back together again," they said in a court filing.

The state and lawyers for the mothers also disputed the impact of decisions from two Bexar County courts last week. The state said two state district judges released about 20 children on condition that they remain within Bexar under state supervision.

Lawyers for the mothers said that information was incorrect — they said CPS agreed to send 12 children back to their parents. They said the Bexar outcome undermines several of the state's arguments, showing family units can be identified and that a trial court can impose conditions on the return of any child under the Family Code.

The state in recent weeks has been forced to recognize that half of the 30 females it had put in foster care as underage abuse victims because they were mothers or pregnant were in fact adults.