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SAN ANGELO, Texas - They went in looking for a teenage girl in distress, but found out she didn't exist.
They came out of the polygamist sect's sprawling compound near Eldorado, Texas with truckloads of documents, family albums, religious records, photographs, computers, digital files -- and more than 400 children.
A year and a half later, the first criminal trial to emerge from the state's historic raid on the Yearning For Zion Ranch began Monday, with jury selection.
Texas prosecutors allege that Raymond Merril Jessop broke the law by having sex with an underage girl he married in a ceremony blessed by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the sect that owns, occupies and operates the secretive Schleicher County ranch.
The trial that began Monday will be the first of 10 criminal trials for men in the sect. The state claims FLDS members prey on their children by marrying girls to older men, often their blood relatives; FLDS leaders and members claim the state is persecuting it for practicing its religion.
Jessop, 37, has pleaded not guilty to the charge of sexual assault of a minor, a second-degree felony punishable by two to 20 years in prison. Defense attorneys have launched a variety of actions since the April 2008 raid, among them motions earlier this year to have the evidence seized at the ranch suppressed, arguing that the original search warrant was flawed, and in the past week a 25-page consolidated motion to have the original indictments against all the men quashed because of the 12 grand jury members only one was Hispanic, although the population of Schleicher County includes more than 37 percent Hispanic people.
The motion argues that the men's rights to a "fair cross-section" or "representative" grand jury under the U.S. Constitution's Fifth and Sixth amendments, equal rights and due process guaranteed by the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments, and similar rights guaranteed under state laws, were violated by the jury composition.
The motion offers statistics suggesting that the grand jury was the rule rather than the exception, stating that over the past decade in Schleicher County, Hispanics made up 17.4 percent of grand jurors despite being more than 37 percent of the population and 31 percent of the eligible voters, the pool from which grand juries are drawn.
Despite these and other tactics, jury selection began at 9 a.m. Monday in the Schleicher County Courthouse in Eldorado, where two eminent adversaries will engage before the bench again.
Eric J.R. Nichols will prosecute the case for the state. Nichols is deputy attorney general for criminal justice and a former assistant U.S. attorney for the southern Texas district, where he prosecuted white-collar criminals. Nichols is a graduate of the University of Texas law school and a regular name on a list of Texas "superlawyers."
Jessop's defender is San Antonio attorney Mark Stevens, a St. Mary's University School of Law 1979 graduate who also regularly appears on the Texas superlawyer list and, according to his Web site, rated among the best lawyers in America by Naifeh & Smith since 1992.
Judge Barbara Walther of the 51st District will preside over the trial.
The prosecution's witness list runs to more than 60 names. Two weeks have been allocated for the trial.
One name on the witness list is John P. "Jack" Sampson, a University of Texas law professor who said Friday he had been called as an expert witness on Texas family code provisions regarding marriages.
Other witnesses on the list include numerous law enforcement officers, officials from the Department of Family and Protective Services, former sect member and author Carolyn Jessop, three sect members from the YFZ Ranch, a Denton attorney, forensic experts and clerks from check cashing stores.
Peggy Williams, the district court clerk in Eldorado, said jury selection may take two days.
(Michael Kelly is a reporter for the Standard Times in San Angelo, Texas.)
