Legal News

Suffer the Children? Texas Lawyers Weigh Strategy in Polygamy Case

By Ashby Jones

Any Texas attorneys out there looking to do a little volunteer lawyering? Fort Worth family-law attorney Tom Vick might have work for you.

Vick is heading up the Texas Bar Association’s effort to recruit volunteer lawyers from across Texas to help handle the work on behalf of the 416 children removed last week from a polygamous religious sect’s West Texas compound. “The numbers are just mind-boggling,” he told the WSJ. He anticipates needing some 100 lawyers to handle the work. Click here for an AP story on how the case came together.

To justify the weekend’s action, state officials must prove the children, part of a Mormon splinter group called the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, were abused, neglected or in imminent danger. At a hearing set for next week, a judge will review the state’s evidence and rule on whether some or all of the children taken from the compound should be put into state-supervised foster care or returned to live with the sect. The court is in the process of assigning attorneys and special advocates to represent each child.

Rather than making 416 individual cases, the state likely will argue that all the children were harmed or potentially harmed by life inside the sect, said Darrell Azar, communications director for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services. Given the communal nature of life in the compound, added Vick, the state may be able to make the case that “if it’s a dangerous situation for one child, it’s a dangerous situation for all.”

Several calls placed to attorneys for the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints weren’t returned. But Bruce Perry, a Houston child psychiatrist and trauma expert who is advising Texas officials, said the parents’ lawyers are likely to respond by saying state officials “can’t tar everyone with the same brush,” asking for proof of risk for each child.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on April 11, 2008 (boomark / email).