Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The headquarters of the FLDS remained in Hildale, Utah – a twin city with
Colorado City, Arizona. The FLDS also operate in a small outpost just
across the Canadian border in Bountiful, British Columbia. Over its nearly
eight decades of existence, membership in the FLDS Church grew to 10,000
members. In the late 1990s a former higher school principal named Warren
Jeffs began assuming a greater leadership role in the FLDS Church before
becoming the church’s undisputed leader in 2002 following the death of his
father Rulon Jeffs.
Dale Barlow was quickly located in Colorado City, Arizona where he lives.
He was one of several FLDS member arrested in Mohave County, Arizona,
in 2005 on a number of sex related offenses with minors. He pled guilty last
year to one count of conspiring to have sexual contact with a minor and was
placed on probation. Conditions of his probation require that he report to his
probation officer twice a month, register as a sex offender, and secure a
permit to travel before leaving the state of Arizona.
“At this time, our contact with Mr. Barlow is complete,” said Trish Carter, a
spokesperson for the sheriff’s department, “We have not been informed of a
warrant, or any more information being sought.”
Barlow’s probation officer, Bill Loader, told the Salt Lake Tribune: “He
[Barlow] said the authorities had called him and some girl had accused him
of assaulting her, and he didn’t even know who she was.”
No one seems to know who the mysterious 16-year-old girl is. That
unsolved mystery raises a number of questions. How did she get a cell phone
inside the FLDS compound? The religious sect does not believe in modern
amenities so it can reasonably be assumed that there are no land line
telephones, much less cell phones, accessible to women and children. And
how did she get the telephone number of the local family violence shelter?
Surely, this information was not lying around on a FLDS coffee table or
tacked to a community bulletin board in some common area inside the
compound. Women and children rarely, if ever, went to town – and if and
when they did, they certainly did not tour the local family violence shelter.
These teenaged brides were so tightly controlled that they were drinking raw
milk straight from the cow.
The central legal question not answered for the public by either the Texas
DPS or CPS is this: how did Dale Barlow marry, impregnate, and physically
abuse the unidentified 16-year-old inasmuch as he’s been living in Colorado
City, Arizona since at least 2005? He’s been a registered sex offender since
last year with severely limited travel restrictions. He lives in an Arizona
home with a wife, two other women, and 20 children he has fathered with all
three women. Based upon publicly known information, it certainly stretches
the realm of logic that he could maintain yet another marriage at the YRZ
ranch with a 16-year-old bride.
Although San Angelo state district court Judge Barbara Walther reportedly
signed an arrest warrant for Barlow on April 3, this information was
apparently not been conveyed sufficiently enough to Arizona authorities for
them to arrest Barlow.
A 14 or 16 year old girl cannot buy alcohol, cigarettes in some areas, or join
the military. Yet Texas legislators believe these young teenagers are capable
child birth and rearing, accepting the awesome responsibilities of marriage,
and joining the ranks of womanhood. Surprisingly, these same lawmakers
lament the social evils associated with unwed teenaged pregnancies. There’s
something “pioneer” about that stunning legislative contradiction.
The massive law enforcement raid on the YFZ ranch and the detention of all
the men and boys there also raises serious legal questions. For all practical
purposes, the FLDS males have been “arrested.” The Court of Criminal
Appeals has said that an “arrest” occurs when a person’s liberty of
movement is restricted or restrained. See: Amores v. State, 816 S.W.2d 407,
411 (Tex.Crim.App. 1991). The FLDS men and boys have been confined to
the YFZ ranch.
The following are examples of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruling
that the detention of an individual rose to the level of arrest:
• Defendant was arrested when officers grabbed his arm, “escorted him
outside,” and ordered him to raise his hands and told him he was
under arrest. Hogan v. State, 631 S.W.2d 159 (Tex.Crim.App. 1982).
• Arrest occurred when reserve officer for Sheriff’s Department “held”
defendant for the police. Hardinge v. State, 500 S.W.2d 800
(Tex.Crim.App. 1973).
• Defendant arrested when taken outside and ordered to place his
booted feet into boot tracks from the scene of the crime to the vicinity
of defendant’s house, despite the fact that officers told him that he
was only under investigation. Woods v. State, 466 S.W.2d 741
(Tex.Crim.App. 1971).
• Defendant was under arrest when he was “subdued and spread-eagled
against a stock trailer” while officer held pistol on him. White v.
State, 601 S.W.2d 364 (Tex.Crim.App. 1980).
• Defendant arrested when taken from inside the courthouse to a room
in Sheriff’s office at the same courthouse, and subsequently
questioned for three hours. Maldonado v. State, 528 S.W.2d 234
(Tex.Crim.App. 1975).
• Defendant was arrested when he was ordered at gunpoint to freeze
and to place his hands on vehicle. Colston v. State, 511 S.W.2d 10
(Tex.Crim.App. 1974).
The large scale detention of FLDS males at the YFZ ranch is not the kind of
“investigative detention” authorized by the Supreme Court in Terry v. Ohio.
Terry allows law enforcement to briefly detain and question a person
concerning his identity, his purpose for being in a given area or location, and
to make other similar inquiries of an investigative nature.
The FLDS detentions, therefore, are “arrests” under state law – and it will be
state law that will decide the legality of those arrests. See: Milton v. State,
549 S.W.2d 190, 192 (Tex.Crim.app. 1977), In all likelihood, these arrests
were made without arrest warrants. Tex. Code Crim. Proc. § 14.03(a)(1)
authorizes a warrantless arrest of “persons found in suspicious places and
under circumstances which reasonably show that such persons have been
guilty of some felony.” This statute requires “the legal equivalent of
constitutional probable cause.” See: Amores, supra, at 413.
The Amores court then emphasized that “an anonymous phone call,”
standing alone, does not establish probable cause. Id., at 416. See also:
Royas v. State, 797 S.W.2d 41, 43 (Tex.Crim.App. 1973). Law enforcement
authorities must have “additional facts” beyond an anonymous phone call
that “would warrant a man of reasonable caution to conclude that a crime
has been or was being committed.” See: Amores, supra, at 416.
The only evidence that a crime had been committed or was being committed
at the YFZ ranch was the anonymous telephone call from the unidentified
pregnant teenager. That telephone call alone was insufficient to establish
probable cause for either an arrest or a search and seizure of evidence at the
ranch. Rojas v. State, supra; Amores v. State, supra. See also: Colston v.
State, 511 S.W.2d 10 (Tex.Crim.App. 1974).
The anonymous telephone call was certainly sufficient for law enforcement
to send a couple officers and/or CPS workers to the YFZ ranch to make
inquiries about alleged criminal wrongdoing. But, standing alone, the
anonymous telephone call was woefully inadequate to justify the military-
style raid launched against that ranch.
The Court of Appeals more recently restated the requirements of probable
cause: “Probable cause requires an evaluation of probabilities, and
probabilities ‘are the factual and practical considerations of everyday life on
which reasonable and prudent men, not legal technicians, act.’ The United
States Supreme Court has described probable cause as a ‘fluid concept[]’; its
‘substantive content’ is derived from ‘the particular context[] in which’ it is
assessed. Probable cause ‘exist[s] where the known facts and circumstances
are sufficient to warrant a man of reasonable prudence in the belief that
contraband or evidence of a crime will be found[.]’ Known facts and
circumstances include those personally known to law enforcement officers
or those derived from a ‘reasonably trustworthy’ source.” See: Wiede v.
State, 214 S.W.2d 17, 24 (Tex.Crim.App. 2007).
There were no “known facts and circumstances” that underage girls were
being forced into marriage by older men at the YFZ ranch. Eldorado Mayor
Nikolauk conceded that local authorities had suspicions that polygamy and
underage marriages were occurring at the ranch, but no known facts.
Based on that anonymous call, those who ordered and participated in the raid
may have been of the opinion that a crime had been or was being committed
at the YFZ ranch but “opinions, even those of police officers, cannot be
transformed into facts without supporting evidence.” See: Torres v. State,
182 S.W.3d 899, 903 (Tex.Crim.App. 2005).
The end result of the raid is that hundreds of children have been separated
from their parents. They are now being pressed into “foster homes” by state
social workers. While law enforcement authorities may ultimately produce
evidence of criminal wrongdoing seized during their raid, it is highly
unlikely that the evidence will withstand a pre-trial motion to suppress in
any eventual criminal prosecution of individuals linked to that evidence.
Law enforcements authorities simply did not have sufficient probable cause
to, first, launch the military-styled raid, and, second, to either arrest or search
and seize evidence at YFZ ranch. This was made even more evident by the
refusal of Arizona authorities to arrest Dale Barlow based on some
anonymous telephone call alleging criminal conduct by him.