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Prosecutors Seek To Offer Unusual Religious Analysis In Competency Trial

By Howard M. Friedman

A federal judge in Utah is being asked to permit rather unusual testimony about religious beliefs in the third competency hearing for Brian David Mitchell who has been charged with the 2002 kidnapping in Salt Lake City, Utah of then 14-year old Elizabeth Smart. (Background). According to KSL-TV yesterday, prosecutors want a professor who is an expert in the analysis of scripture, and an investigator of the Ervil LeBaron polygamy cult decades ago, to testify to show that Mitchell's religious writings do not show that he is delusional and mentally ill. Mitchell wrote a book of scripture, "The Book of Immanuel David Isaiah," in which he suggests he has powers greater than God's. Psychiatric experts used that to show he was incompetent to stand trial. Now the prosecution wants to call their witnesses to show that Mitchell's religious writings were coherent when viewed in the proper cultural context. They resemble views in Ervil LeBaron's "Book of the New Covenant" in which he justified over two dozen killings in biblical language.

Full post as published by Religion Clause on September 30, 2009 (boomark / email).