Polygamist leader facing life sentence after guilty verdict

Warren Jeffs, the leader of a polygamist church sect, was found guilty Tuesday of rape charges for coercing a 14-year-old girl to marry her 19-year-old cousin. Jeffs, 51, faces a possible life sentence. A jury in Salt Lake City took two days to reach the verdict after a trial in which prosecutors charged Jeffs as an accomplice to rape for allegedly used his religious authority as leader of the 10,000- member Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS), which openly practices polygamy, to force the girl into a marriage to which she could not legally consent. During the trial, the girl testified that Jeffs told her that her salvation would be endangered should she refuse to submit to marriage with her cousin in a religious rite in 2001. "Warren Jeffs told them to go forward and multiply and replenish the Earth, and that is why that man is an accomplice to rape," prosecutor Brock Belnap said. Jeffs, who was on the FBI's most-wanted list, has allegedly arranged similar marriages for girls as young as 13 and faces charges in Arizona of being an accomplice to incest and sex with minors. The FLDS split in the 1930s from the mainstream Mormon Church, which renounced polygamy in 1904. dpa ag ff