Legal News

Texas Not Done Fighting, Takes Custody Case to State Supreme Court

By Dan Slater

While Texas Legal Aid and libertarian groups hailed yesterday’s ruling from a state appeals court that the state of Texas had no right to seize more than 400 children from the Yearning for Zion Ranch, no one expected the fight to end there.

And apparently it won’t. Today, Child Protective Services filed a petition for a writ of mandamus and a motion for relief. Here’s the AP report, and here’s LB coverage of yesterday’s ruling.

Yesterday, in what many believe is the largest custody case in U.S. history, a three-judge panel of Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Austin unanimously ruled that the state failed to show that the children were in immediate danger of sexual or physical abuse when they were rounded up from the YFZ ranch and sent to foster facilities around the state. Technically, the ruling applied only to the children of 38 mothers named in the appeal, but the ruling was broad enough to cover nearly every child swept up in the April raid.

LB Reading Recommendation: For those Loyal LB’ers who plan to put their work away for the holiday weekend and do some traveling, print out this story, which ran in the most recent issue of Portfolio magazine, and take it with you. It’s a fascinating feature about Bruce Wisan, an accountant by trade who was hired by the state of Utah to replace Warren Jeffs — the imprisoned leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which financed the YFZ Ranch — as the head of the community. As Claire Hoffman reports, Wisan, who’s neither a prophet nor a polygamist, has been put in charge of the United Effort Plan, the legal trust that the polygamists started by pooling their resources and creating a communal society 66 years ago. Worth an estimated $110 million, the trust holds a variety of assets, from homes, to farms, to factories, to schoolhouses — not to mention a church and a zoo.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on May 23, 2008 (boomark / email).