BishopAccountability.org
	Lawyer for Jailed Polygamist Leader Talks to News 4 KVOA April 9, 2008 http://www.kvoa.com/Global/story.asp?S=8142293&nav=HMO6HMaW [with video] Court documents released Tuesday show the 16-year-old girl who triggered the raid on a compound in Texas founded by jailed polygamist leader Warren Jeffs called a local family violence shelter saying her 50-year-old husband, beat her. In the documents, the girl says she is his seventh wife and during the violence, another wife held her baby. She also indicated she is pregnant. Still, a spokeswoman for child protective services says the agency doesn't know whether that 16-year-old is among the 416 children removed. The women and children are staying at shelters and community support is pouring in. As Tucson attorney Mike Piccarreta follows the news this week about the raid in Texas, he doesn't like what he's seeing. "You shouldn't be allowed to search a whole village on the basis of a phone call and not only search the area where there might be evidence but search every residence in the village? That's never happened in American jurisprudence," he says. Piccarreta says what most people know about FLDS is from people who've left the religion because the fundamentalists rarely talk to outsiders. And that's partly why Piccarreta says their reputation is often misunderstood. "The mainstream media has focused on the sexual aspect or the titillation aspect of it, without even recognizing that that's a basic tenet of their belief." Piccarreta says the raid in Texas is reminiscent of one in Arizona in 1953. It's called the Short Creek Raid: more than 400 Mormon fundamentalists were taken into custody. But public reaction viewed the raid with sympathy, saying it was as un-American. "This religion has a long history of being persecuted by the government," Piccarreta says. "This is a real religion, it's being persecuted and it's not right what's going on," he says.
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