(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-04-15 08:32

Texas bar officials said more than 350 lawyers from across the state have volunteered to represent the children free of charge. Moreover, the 139 mothers who voluntarily left the sect to be with their children may hire lawyers, too, to help them fight for custody.

The sheer numbers left the judge perplexed as she considered suggestions from the lawyers for how to handle Thursday's hearing.

"It would seem inefficient to have a witness testify 416 times," the judge offered. "If I gave everybody five minutes, that would be 70 hours."

In an unintended illustration of the problem, Walther gave the lawyers 30 minutes to break into groups and report back to her with ideas. It took almost two hours for everyone to reassemble.

The raid followed a call to a domestic violence hot line from a 16-year-old girl who said she was beaten and raped by her 50-year-old husband.

In addition to becoming a monumental legal morass, the case is proving to be a public-relations headache for the state.

Over the weekend, some of the mothers went on the offensive, complaining the children are falling ill and are frightened and traumatized from living in cramped conditions at the fort, with cots, cribs and playpens lined up side by side.

The secretive nature of the sect — and the indoctrination children receive from birth to mistrust outsiders — have added to the confusion.

Randoll Stout, one of the lawyers who plan to represent some of the children, said the youngsters "seem to change their names. Adults change their names. Children are passed around."

Lawyers said the state told the mothers that if they leave the shelters where their children are being held, they will not be let back in. Griselda Paz of Legal Aid of Northwest Texas said she had never seen such restrictions in 20 years of legal work.

"By isolating them, by not letting them talk to their lawyers or giving them the choice between leaving their children and being able to talk to lawyers and prepare for this hearing, they feel that that's unfair," said Parker, the FLDS lawyer, who has represented the church and some of its members in civil and criminal cases. "And of course they are out of their element, they're frightened of all those things."

Betty Balli Torres, executive director of the Texas Access to Justice Foundation, said it is vital that the mothers be represented by lawyers. Otherwise, they could lose their children — "what we call kind of the death penalty of family law cases."

She said 10 women went into the San Angelo legal aid office last week seeking help and reported there were 100 more women who needed lawyers. Attorneys began meeting with the women over the weekend.

A church lawyer, Rod Parker, said the 60 or so men remaining on the 1,700-acre ranch have offered to leave the compound if the state would allow the women and children to return to the place with child welfare monitors. But the state Children's Protective Services agency said it had not yet seen the offer and had no comment on it.

The sect practices polygamy in arranged marriages between underage girls and older men. The group has thousands of followers in two side-by-side towns in Arizona and Utah. The sect's prophet and spiritual leader, Warren Jeffs, is in prison for forcing an underage age into a marriage in Utah.

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