Final Arguments - Day 2

It is gratifying to be able to watch the proceedings at home on my computer.  For the first time, not only do viewers get to see the faces of the lawyers, but we can actually hear every word that is uttered.  (So different from sitting in Courtroom 55, where the walls are padded with sound-reducing fabric, and where the lawyers and judge are some 25 feet in front of the public seating.)   I have always believed that justice should be seen to be done, but in Courtroom 55 something should be done to ensure that justice can also be heard while it is being done!

Yesterday's final arguments by the AGBC produced some interesting newspaper comments.  In the Globe and Mail this morning, James Keller wrote:

In late 2005, the now-jailed polygamist leader Warren Jeffs called two men in Bountiful, B.C., and told them to bring their 12-year-old daughters to the United States to be wed, according to passages from Mr. Jeffs’s diaries presented in a B.C. court Tuesday.

Mr. Jeffs, who was in his late 40s or early 50s at the time and already married to dozens of women, told the men the girls would become his new wives.

In the diaries, Mr. Jeffs describes one of the fathers as “thrilled” with the news and goes on to describe the marriages, saying he and the girls were “sealed for time and eternity.”

“I then called in these two young ladies. I explained to all that these girls were to be sealed to me to protect them at a time when they were able to be sealed and that I had their fathers’ permission and the Lord’s direction,” Mr. Jeffs said in the diaries, portions of which were read in court during closing arguments at a landmark case about Canada’s polygamy law.

Read more at

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Also in yesterday's Globe and Mail, there was an article about the harms caused by polygamy.  You can find that at

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/search/?q=polygamy&searchField=keywords&searchQuery=*%3A*