The Common Room: Texas Seeks To Raise Statute of Limitations on "Bigamy"

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Texas Seeks To Raise Statute of Limitations on "Bigamy"

Scott Henson at Grits for Breakfast explains:

Now the Texas Legislature is flexing its own creative muscles trying to salvage prosecutions from this fiasco.

Legislation to lengthen the statute of limitations on bigamy passed the Senate and will be heard this week in the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee. Apparently, since authorities couldn't prosecute polygamists at the YFZ Ranch in West Texas as they'd prefer, they now want to give prosecutors up to seven years to pursue bigamy cases, ten if they involve a minor (although no victims are clamoring for prosecutions). The current statute of limitations for bigamy is just three years, as is the case for most felonies.

A different House committee already heard related but much broader legislation that has not moved nearly so far along in the process, so if this gets to the floor, I'd expect Reps Harvey Hildebran and Drew Darby to try to load it up with all the extra mischief in their bill. Sometimes you really have to get creative if you want to use the force of the state to impose your personal moral code on others but can't figure out how to do so within the constraints of their constitutional rights.

What we're talking about here is not what most of us think of as bigamy, whereby one man deceives two or more women, defrauding them by purporting to married to each one, leaving them stunned, astonished, and without the legal status and protection they believed they had. This is about calling more than one woman your wife, without benefit of legal ceremony, and when each of the 'sister wives' knows about the others, and, indeed, expects there to be others.

This is not a lifestyle I would choose, nor one I particularly approve of, but the fact is that it's not morally the same thing as that sort of bigamy. All the wives involved know about the others- and they know, going into the marriage, that they will probably not be the only wife. Otherwise, they wouldn't be a part of that religion. Nobody here is deceived, defrauded, or cheated, nor is the state defrauded by two or more civil ceremonies.

So what is the justification for making the statute of limitations on this crime longer than other felonies? Could it be any clearer that this is about going after a religion?

Scott Henson at Grits for Breakfast explains:

Now the Texas Legislature is flexing its own creative muscles trying to salvage prosecutions from this fiasco.

Legislation to lengthen the statute of limitations on bigamy passed the Senate and will be heard this week in the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee. Apparently, since authorities couldn't prosecute polygamists at the YFZ Ranch in West Texas as they'd prefer, they now want to give prosecutors up to seven years to pursue bigamy cases, ten if they involve a minor (although no victims are clamoring for prosecutions). The current statute of limitations for bigamy is just three years, as is the case for most felonies.

A different House committee already heard related but much broader legislation that has not moved nearly so far along in the process, so if this gets to the floor, I'd expect Reps Harvey Hildebran and Drew Darby to try to load it up with all the extra mischief in their bill. Sometimes you really have to get creative if you want to use the force of the state to impose your personal moral code on others but can't figure out how to do so within the constraints of their constitutional rights.