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  Mcentee: Krakauer’s Shots at Jeffs Ruling Lack Evidence

Salt Lake Tribune
August 3, 2010

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/home/50039286-76/krakauer-church-jeffs-lds.html.csp

Last week, writer Jon Krakauer stated on CNN that the Utah Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Warren S. Jeffs’ conviction on rape as an accomplice had a “political basis,” given the justices’ “close ties to the LDS Church.”

Really?

He also said the LDS Church has concerns about sexual abuse. Well, name me a church that doesn’t have those worries.

And he asked, “What does this say about, you know, how you can tie someone who compelled rape but didn’t actually commit the rape, how can he be held accountable?

“That’s a scary thing for some members high up in the LDS Church,” Krakauer said on “Anderson Cooper 360” on July 27.

In my almost two decades of involvement with the polygamy story, this allegation is a first.

I’ve read most of Krakauer’s books, including Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, which chronicles a disastrous Everest ascent. And Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, his account of the early Mormon church and the fundamentalist Lafferty brothers who murdered their sister-in-law and tiny niece in 1984 after Ron said he had received a revelation from God.

He also has long been involved with the anti-FLDS faction. He wrote about the sect when news coverage started to ramp up in 2004, and mentored and paid for the education of a “lost boy” expelled from the FLDS community.

Krakauer knows his subject, but last week on CNN his statements went unsupported by evidence.

Jeffs was convicted in 2007 of the charges, which involved a 2001 marriage — of the “spiritual” kind — he performed between a 14-year-old girl and her 19-year-old cousin.

But the justices found the trial judge erred when he rejected a defense request to tell jurors that in order to convict, they had to find that Jeffs knew unwanted sex would take place and he intended for a rape to occur.

They also found the judge wrongly instructed the jury to focus on Jeffs’ actions and positions as a religious leader — and not the groom, the alleged rapist.

Before the wedding, the 14-year-old begged Jeffs not to make her marry her cousin, but Jeffs insisted that it go on and denied the girl’s plea to be released from the marriage afterward.

To Krakauer, that meant Jeffs “knew she’d be brutally raped. He was an accomplice as much as if he’d locked the door to the bedroom and tied her to the bed.”

Thing is, the justices made clear that under state law, a defendant would have had to know the offense would be committed and to have helped the “principal actor” in the offense.

So I’m trying to parse out what, in Krakauer’s view, the LDS Church — which abandoned polygamy 120 years ago and has publicly condemned it countless times — had to do with the Supreme Court’s decision.

 
 

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