Bountiful mother appeals sentence
Emily Ruth Gail Blackmore, currently in jail for taking her 13-year-old daughter to the United States to be placed in a polygamous marriage, is asking the B.C. Court of Appeal to overturn both her conviction and her sentence.
Last month, the 60-year-old mother was handcuffed and led out of a Cranbrook courtroom to begin a seven-month jail term after being found guilty of unlawfully removing of a child from Canada for a sexual purpose in 2004. The maximum penalty for the offence is five years in jail.
In addition to imprisonment, Blackmore was given 18 months’ probation and 120 hours of community service in Creston. She was required to give a DNA sample, which, along with her name, was placed on Canada’s Sex Offender Registry for a decade.
Her daughter, now nearly 26, wept when she heard the sentence, along with other women from the fundamentalist Mormon community wearing their drab, pioneer-styled dresses. Her attempt to plead with the judge was rebuffed. One of her sisters fled the courtroom and wailed in the hallway.
The decision was stunning. No one expected her to go to jail.
There was little reaction when her husband, Brandon Blackmore, was sentenced to a year in jail, followed by 18 months’ probation and registered as a sex offender.
Unlike Gail, who was one of his several wives, 71-year-old Brandon is no longer a member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. He has been excommunicated, stripped of his wives and children. At the time of his arrest, he was living in an abandoned bus.
But in 2004, both parents were devout FLDS members. On the instructions of their prophet, Warren Jeffs, they drove their daughter from Bountiful, across the U.S. border, and then to Utah. Once in Utah, both parents and the 13-year-old met with Jeffs. Then, a few days later, both witnessed her marriage to the 49-year-old prophet.
That September, within a few weeks of her 14th birthday, Jeffs raped the girl and recorded it. The audio recording was played at the November trial. (Jeffs is now also in jail, serving a life sentence in Texas for sexually assaulting two 12-year-old girls.)
Despite the reaction in the courtroom, Gail Blackmore’s appeal is still surprising. The 60-year-old had previously refused legal counsel, did nothing to defend herself, and didn’t even pay that much attention during the hearings, preferring to read instead.
Lawyer Greg DelBigio filed Gail Blackmore’s appeal earlier this week. He contends that the circumstantial evidence was not enough to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. He called the conviction “unreasonable and cannot be supported by the evidence,” while the sentence as “unduly harsh and excessive in length.”
What Blackmore and her lawyer want is to have the conviction overturned or the jail sentence replaced with a conditional sentence to be served in Bountiful.
Special prosecutor Peter Wilson has not yet filed a response.
But in the sentencing decision, the judge wrote that Gail Blackmore was “a willing participant” who “foresaw as a certainty or near certainty that the child would have sexual relations … upon or shortly after the marriage.”
He said she “has shown no remorse and does not acknowledge that she has committed an offence.”
The judge rejected a conditional sentence, saying that her offence “calls for a sentence which unequivocally communicates society’s denunciation of this conduct and deters others from (this) conduct.”
If Blackmore were allowed to serve a conditional sentence within her community, it would be “inconsistent with the fundamental principles of sentencing.”
Blackmore will now likely be released, pending the B.C. Court of Appeal hearing.
So far, there is no indication that Brandon Blackmore is appealing.
But on Friday, the Court of Appeal will deal with another aspect of the case. The judges decide whether to appoint an “amicus curiae” (a friend of the court) to provide advice during the appeal of Blackmores’ codefendant, James Oler.
The Crown is appealing the former FLDS bishop’s acquittal on a charge that he unlawfully took his 15-year-old daughter to the United States in June 2004 for a polygamous marriage to an older man. Like Gail Blackmore, Oler refused legal counsel for his trial, did not offer any defence, and did not participate in the trial other than to show up every day. But unlike Blackmore, Oler has continued to refuse legal counsel both for this appeal and during his other trial this spring, where he was found guilty of one count of polygamy.
Oler’s acquittal is being appealed on the basis that the judge erred by concluding that Oler had to have been in Canada when he formed the intent to take his daughter across the U.S. border.
Further, the prosecution argues that the judge erred by “drawing the speculative inference” that Oler was not in Canada.
Hearing dates for the two appeals have yet to be set.