By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Thursday, May 22, 2008, at 6:09 PM ET
For those of you who haven't been following the many legal twists and turns of the Texas polygamy story, today's news of a state appellate court ruling that child welfare officials impermissibly seized hundreds of children from a polygamist ranch over three days in April will be shocking. It seemed an open-and-shut case of child abuse, right? Young girls married to much older men, trapped on a compound, bearing babies. The question was not so much why the state removed 465 children from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on April 3 but, rather, what the heck took them so long?
More recent reporting has shown that the legal apparatus intended to protect abused children in Texas was strained to the breaking point by what turned out to be one of the largest child welfare cases in American history. Earlier today, attorneys for Child Protective Services confirmed that 15 of the 31 "child" mothers placed in foster care were actually adults. One is 27. A 14-year-old removed as a child mother apparently has no children. The state had raided the ranch after a 16-year-old girl called an abuse hotline saying she had been beaten and raped by her 50-year-old husband, but that girl has not been found. And interim custody placements made parental visits difficult, if not impossible. Seized children were not even permitted to hear sect prophet Warren Jeffs' name. The original custody proceedings had been hasty, chaotic, and confused. And estimated court costs were being projected at $2.25 million (before lawyers' fees).
In other words, what was intended as a noble effort suddenly got mired down in tricky factual disputes, cultural and religious clashes, and the practical necessity of warehousing hundreds of human beings for an indefinite period of time. If this sounds a whole lot like the Bush administration's fruitless, costly, and ultimately cruel exercises in mass justice at Guantanamo Bay, that's because the parallels are hard to miss. In both cases, government actors hurled themselves at a problem with the best of intentions. The prospect of averting just one more terror attack, or protecting just one more molested child, has a way of making all those technical legal details seem trivial. But both cases have been plagued by glaring errors of fact and identification: Names and ages and associations were all jumbled up, hearsay and double hearsay piled up in place of real evidence. At the time, it probably seemed like all the
who's and where's could eventually be sorted out later. But there were real costs to surging forward ahead of the legal niceties.
The most important parallel between the seizure of the 465 children from the Yearning for Zion Ranch and the warehousing of 775 alleged prisoners at Guantanamo Bay in 2002 is that legal processes are slow and careful and cautious—or, at least, they trend that way over the long haul. That makes them poorly suited to exigent situations in which the rights of hundreds of different individuals are at risk. It also makes them poorly suited for grand political gestures.
Read more:
http://www.slate.com/id/2191009/