the sound of every criminal defense attorney cringing at once

by twit

sounds something like this:

(CBS) Many of the men in the polygamist sect in Eldorado, Texas didn’t know it is illegal to marry someone under 18, one of them tells Early Show co-anchor Maggie Rodriguez in an exclusive interview.

… Asked by Rodriguez if he was saying older men don’t marry adolescent girls in the compound, Edson replied, “I didn’t say that at all, but I think that people have a false concept of what our religion is all about. To say that they’re sexually abused and that people here are — they haven’t found anything to my knowledge that proves that.

… But I think that, overall, they look at us as if we’re immoral people and, in our own makeup, that is the very most important part of our religion, is to be morally clean. I have a hard time standing here being a criminal, when I had no idea that I’m a criminal.

(Videos of the interview can be seen here)

emphasis and cringe added. ‘Ignorance of the law is no excuse‘ is just a starting point for the kind of conniptions this might produce. It has been a minute since I checked, but I have a dim recollection that once you say goodbye to your fifth amendment privilege against self-incrimination, it is gone for good…

In other news, Wired offers this perspective on a video clip of an earlier ABC News interview with sect members:

In the bizarre clip, the women — identified only as Nancy, Marie and Esther — answer questions in remarkably similar sing-song voices and speak almost in unison.

Clad in matching dresses and looking like they just stepped out of a time machine set to 1880, the women project an eerie Star Trek-meets-Little House on the Prairie vibe.

They complain oh so meekly about the raid that left 416 children in state custody as authorities try to get to the bottom of what, exactly, was going on at the Yearning for Zion Ranch.

The Associated Press takes a closer look at the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints on April 19, 2008:

The YFZ Ranch - which, as the townspeople would come to learn, stood for Yearning for Zion - would mushroom into a bustling, parallel city: a 1,691-acre, self-sustaining enclave carved, literally, into a rock pile for the innermost circle of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, FLDS, a 10,000-member sect that has continued to practice polygamy after it was banned by the Mormon Church in 1890.

Here, there would be enormous dormitories for enormous families, a cheese factory, a medical clinic, a grain silo, a commissary, a sewage treatment plant - and watchtowers with sentries, infrared night-vision cameras to monitor gated entrances, and 10-foot-high compound walls topped with spikes.

There would evolve a saga of “plural marriages,” racism, underage “celestial” brides and allegations of child abuse, turning Eldorado upside down with frightening tales, rumors, and a flood of reporters and investigators. A raid on the polygamists’ compound - the largest of its kind in more than a half century in the West, involving hundreds of law enforcement agents - would lead to the removal of 416 children and set up a child custody confrontation of unprecedented dimensions.

and how the investigations into the compound began:

On a chilly evening in January 2004, J.D. Doyle, a pilot, and his father, James, the local justice of the peace, climbed into their Piper twin-engine plane and took to the skies over Schleicher County to see if recent rains had greened the grazing fields owned by friends who were cattle ranchers.

But as they flew over the YFZ property four miles north of Eldorado, they noticed something different: Down below, jutting up between scatterings of cedar bushes and outcroppings of limestone, were three enormous, cabin-style barracks with enough room to accommodate two football teams.

What were those doing on a hunting retreat?

Later, they asked a friend, Joe Christian, a computer tech who lived adjacent to the YFZ ranch, what he made of it. Christian hadn’t a clue, actually. His new neighbors had been reclusive, leaving him to puzzle over all that nonstop building. We should take some aerial photographs, he suggested; the Doyles agreed.

The photos intrigued Randy and Kathy Mankin, who published the town’s weekly paper, The Eldorado Success, so they did a background check on the buyer, Allred. Initially, they saw no red flags: He was, as he’d claimed, a builder from Washington County, Utah. Still, why build such large residences on so remote a ranch?

Then, in late March, the paper got a call from Flora Jessop, an anti-polygamy activist from Utah who’d been raised in the FLDS and who, as a teenager, had run away from the sect. A polygamist group, she’d been told, was rumored to be establishing another enclave in west Texas.

In Randy Mankin’s mind, polygamy had already taken its place on history’s ash heap. But the caller wouldn’t stop asking questions. When Mankin finally relinquished the name of the buyer, he heard a silence on the line, then:

“Oh, my God … it’s them … “