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	Texas, Feds Wait Their Turn after Utah Supreme Court Reverses Convictions of Polygamist Leader By Jennifer Dobner Star Tribune July 28, 2010 http://www.startribune.com/nation/99321734.html SALT LAKE CITY - A Utah Supreme Court decision that overturns polygamous church leader Warren Jeffs' 2007 criminal conviction won't automatically make him a free man. Even if Utah doesn't retry him, Texas and federal prosecutors are waiting to move forward with their own cases. Justices on Tuesday unanimously said Jeffs should get a new trial because state attorneys overreached in their argument that performing the marriage of a 14-year-old girl to her 19-year-old cousin amounted to facilitating a rape. Utah officials now have two weeks to seek a rehearing before the state's high court and then a month to decide if they'll retry the 54-year-old head of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints on charges of first-degree felony rape as an accomplice. Authorities in Texas are trying to get him sent there to face charges in connection with his own alleged marriages to underage sect girls in 2005. A federal indictment stemming from Jeffs' stint as a fugitive on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list is also pending. "He would not go free," said Melodie Rydalch, spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney's office in Utah. Any federal prosecution would likely come after cases in Utah and Texas are resolved, Rydalch said, but in the hours after the ruling, it was unclear just how the states would proceed. "We're going to take a look at this case anew and do a legal analysis of the ruling," Deputy Washington County Attorney Brian Filter said. "We're going to talk to the victim and to law enforcement. What we've done from the beginning is tried to seek justice in the case, and that's what we're going to continue to do. Where that takes us, I don't know." In 2007, a jury convicted Jeffs on two counts of rape as an accomplice for his role in the 2001 spiritual marriage of Elissa Wall and Allen Steed.
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