Texas Appellate Court: Officials Did NOT Have The Right To Remove 460 Kids From Their Parents
This is one of the points I’ve been arguing all along:
SAN ANGELO, Texas — A Texas appeals court said Thursday that the state had no right to take more than 400 children from a polygamist sect’s ranch, a ruling that could unravel one of the biggest child-custody cases in U.S. history.
The Third Court of Appeals in Austin ruled that the state offered “legally and factually insufficient” grounds for the “extreme” measure of removing all children from the ranch, from babies to teenagers.
The state never provided evidence that the children were in any immediate danger, the only grounds in Texas law for taking children from their parents without court approval, the appeals court said.
Specifically it said:
“The existence of the FLDS belief system as described by the department’s witnesses, by itself, does not put children of FLDS parents in physical danger,” the court said in its ruling, overturning the order to keep the children by state District Judge Barbara Walther, a former family law attorney.
The appeals court also said the state was wrong to consider the entire ranch as an individual household and that any abuse claims could apply only to individual households.
And that’s another point I’ve been pounding…..each individual case requires its own investigation. You CANNOT just throw a net over an entire community because you think something may be going on.
Whether you like their system of belief or hate it those people are entitled to the same protections under the Constitution as the rest of us. This won’t be the end of the matter, either. Their pending criminal cases WILL unravel (most of them) because of the jack-boot mentality behind this raid.
This whole thing has been a travesty.
