Child-abusing polygamists handed farcical sentence
It’s a travesty. Two men who are both polygamists and child sex abusers won’t spend a day in jail.
Convicted on one count of polygamy, fundamentalist Mormon leader Winston Blackmore was sentenced Tuesday to six months’ house arrest. Presumably, he’ll spend that time in the company of at least some of his 24 wives and 149 children.
In other words, his punishment is to carry on doing exactly what he’s been doing for the last 30 years. After house arrest, the 61-year-old will be on probation for a year.
Trial evidence showed that Blackmore married and impregnated nine women who were under 18; two were only 15.
His co-defendant, James Oler, was sentenced to three months under house arrest and a year’s probation. Oler was convicted for having five wives, two of whom were under 18.
(Last year, Oler was acquitted on a charge of unlawfully removing a child from Canada for illegal purposes. The Crown’s appeal of the acquittal was heard last week and a decision is pending.)
Unlike Blackmore, Oler will likely spend his time under house arrest alone since Warren Jeffs, the pedophile prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, banished Oler from the church and from Bountiful, B.C. It means that he no longer has any contact with his wives, children or anyone else in the community. These sentences are a disgrace. Far from having any deterrent effect, they are more likely to embolden others and not just those within the fundamentalist Mormon tradition.
If there is a chilling effect at all, it will be on those who left this abusive and dysfunctional community and bravely testified against friends and family.
But these slaps on the wrist can’t solely be blamed on Justice Sheri Donegan or even special prosecutor Peter Wilson, who recommended jail sentences far below the maximum of five years imprisonment outlined in the Criminal Code.
The blame accrues to several generations of provincial attorneys general and the lawyers who worked for them. Their hubris and complete disregard for the protection of children and the rights of women has damaged hundreds of lives and is now likely to claim the lives of many more.
As far back as the 1990s, NDP Attorney General Colin Gabelmann could have overridden the recommendations of the ministry lawyers and approved the charges RCMP recommended against Blackmore and Oler’s father, Dalmon.
He could have done it in the public interest, sending a sharp message to the community of fundamentalist Mormons in Bountiful that multiple marriages even in the name of God are illegal.
At the time, the community numbered fewer than 500 members. At its height a few years ago, there were more than 1,500.
But Gabelmann, who is not a lawyer, caved. He bowed to legal opinions from two retired B.C. Supreme Court justices who opined that the religious guarantees in the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms might trump the criminal law.
Those judges formed their opinions in a vacuum with no evidence and no witnesses, and those opinions ran counter to the lawyers in the federal Justice Department.
The Justice Department lawyers concluded that the law first passed in 1890 was a justifiable limit on religious freedom.
In 2004, confronted with new evidence of Blackmore and other prominent men in Bountiful marrying under-aged girls, B.C. Liberal Attorney General Geoff Plant also refused to lay charges, citing constitutional concerns.
He did, however, ask RCMP to reopen its investigation. It was during the investigation that Blackmore brashly held a polygamy summit in April 2005. He invited Plant, along with the attorneys general of Arizona, Utah and Idaho, where other members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints have communities.
Had any of the attorneys general attended, they would have heard Blackmore admit that he had married several under-aged girls in front of close to 500 people from the neighbouring town of Creston.
Wally Oppal replaced Plant as attorney general in the summer of 2005. He was the first and only B.C. attorney general to call what was happening in Bountiful “intolerable.”
He hired Richard Peck as special prosecutor to evaluate the evidence. Peck declined to recommend charges, even though the evidence included birth certificates and DNA samples that proved some of the wives were girls, not women.
Peck recommended a constitutional reference to the Supreme Court of Canada for a final decision on the question. Oppal disagreed. He wanted charges laid, but didn’t have the power to do it himself.
As for a reference to Canada’s top court, that required the federal government to make the application and it wasn’t interested. Canada’s justice minister at the time, Irwin Cotler, reiterated its belief that the law was valid.
Eventually, British Columbia did file a reference to the B.C. Supreme Court, which upheld the law.
All that constitutional fretting took nearly 30 years.
But more importantly, what was lost in that intellectual bafflegab was that girls as young as 15 were forced into religious, plural marriages and subsequently impregnated.
The evidence was there and ignored. And because nobody — none of the attorneys general who preceded or followed Oppal, and none of their deputy ministers or even lawyers in the prosecutions branch — deemed the evidence of child sexual abuse worthy of pursuing, the last special prosecutor on the file was legally barred from even considering it.