Utah Lowers Penalty for Polygamy, No Longer a Felony
An amendment that went into effect this week allows polygamy to be punished as an infraction in some cases, but it remains a felony if force, threats or other abuses are involved.
By Christine Hauser
Published May 13, 2020
Updated July 10, 2020
An amendment that went into effect this week allows polygamy to be punished as an infraction in some cases, but it remains a felony if force, threats or other abuses are involved.
www.nytimes.com
A new law that took effect in Utah this week has lowered the punishment for polygamy in some cases, making it an infraction similar to a traffic summons instead of a felony punishable by a prison term.
Under Senate Bill 102, which was signed into law by Gov. Gary R. Herbert in March and went into effect on Tuesday, a married person can now take additional spouses at the same time and not be subjected to felony charges, as long as the new spouse entered into the union voluntarily.
But a polygamous marriage is still a felony if it was made by threats, fraud or force or involves abuse. Second-degree felonies can carry prison terms of up to 15 years. Barring other factors, polygamy is now an infraction, which can draw fines of up to $750 and community service.
When it was passed by the State Legislature in February, the bill exposed the debate over multiple marriages in Utah, which is believed to be the state with the highest population of polygamists.
Sound Choices Coalition, a group that opposes forced polygamous marriages, called it an “abhorrent” move “supporting a form of modern-day sex slavery.”
“Most who are living in these fundamentalist polygamous groups and families are treated as property, forced to work without pay, traded as daughters, coerced into having unwanted sex, and into giving birth to numerous children they cannot care for,” the group, which includes women who have fled polygamous unions, said in a statement.
But supporters of the bill, whose primary sponsor was State Senator Deidre M. Henderson, a Republican, said it would help people who have been coerced into such arrangements, or who have endured or witnessed abuse, by removing the fear of being prosecuted themselves because they are in a plural marriage.
“We did not legalize bigamy,” Ms. Henderson said in an interview on Wednesday. “We simply removed the fear of otherwise law-abiding polygamists of being jailed or having their children taken away from them.”
“The intent is to lower the barrier to socialization,” she said. “It is not a short-term solution.”
The new law represents a shift in how the state can prosecute polygamous marriages, whose roots in the region can be traced to tenets of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
In 1890, the church formally abandoned the practice of marriage of more than one woman to the same man, and does not consider those who engage in polygamy to be members.
But plural marriages are still practiced by fundamentalist sects and groups that have splintered from the church.
Over the years, cases in Utah have demonstrated that polygamists were less inclined to seek outside help over serious matters such as child abuse and domestic violence because they feared that they could be prosecuted as felons.
In 2001, Tom Green, a Utah husband of five and father of 29, was convicted on charges of bigamy, causing anxiety among the state’s polygamists that prosecutors would be eager to bring them to trial on the same charges, The New York Times reported.
The Utah attorney general at the time, Mark Shurtleff, said he favored reducing the charge of bigamy to a misdemeanor from a felony to encourage people to provide information about serious crimes in polygamous families.
In 2013, a federal judge struck down parts of Utah’s anti-polygamy law as unconstitutional in a case brought by Kody Brown, who, along with his four wives and 17 children, starred in the reality TV show “Sister Wives.”
The judge, Clark Waddoups, found that part of the law prohibiting “cohabitation,” the language used to restrict polygamous relationships, violated the First Amendment guarantee of free exercise of religion, as well as constitutional due process. But Judge Waddoups left standing the state’s ability to prohibit multiple marriages “in the literal sense” of having two or more valid marriage licenses.
Ms. Henderson, the bill’s chief sponsor, said polygamists who have been prosecuted in recent years have been charged for other crimes, not for bigamy.
Warren S. Jeffs, the former professed prophet of a polygamous fundamentalist sect, was sentenced to life in prison in 2011 for the sexual assault of underage girls whom he took as his brides.
Mr. Jeffs’s brother, Lyle Jeffs, who ran the church’s financial affairs, was arrested in 2017 and charged with fraud.
State Representative Jeffrey D. Stenquist, who voted against the amendment in February, said he had heard from victims and their advocates who said they did not want any reduction in the bigamy charge.
“There are still obvious penalties for abuse, but some felt this was taking away one element that helped them feel emboldened to come forward,” Mr. Stenquist, a Republican, said on Wednesday. “There was an additional criminal penalty that could be applied.”
But Connor Boyack, president of the Libertas Institute in Utah, a libertarian-leaning think tank that worked with Ms. Henderson and other supporters of the bill, said removing the specter of felony arrest takes away the ability of abusers to use it to intimidate people into silence.
“Pushing people into the shadows of society allows these abusers to get away with harming people too scared to report such abuse to the public,” Mr. Boyack said in an interview on Wednesday. “Warren Jeffs weaponized Utah’s law” by telling followers the government would take their children away, he added.
“That is the climate where abuse has been allowed to percolate,” Mr. Boyack said. “That is why we felt changing the law was so important.”
If you look at he map, it's illegal in areas where the Catholic Church has heavy dominance