Thursday, March 11, 2010

Location, Location, Location.

It's the Real Estate maxim, and apparently it does matter in the Trial of Merril Leroy Jessop.
When an act is a crime in one place, but not in another, where it happened really does matter.

For instance, it's not a crime for me to be nude, and I am nude every day in the shower. It is one for me to be nude on Main Street. Unless my shower is in my RV and my RV is on Main Street. Likewise it is important where the child that is almost certainly Merril's, was conceived.
The San Angelo Standard-Times - "(Prosecutors) presented evidence that Merril Leroy Jessop resided at the Yearning For Zion Ranch outside Eldorado, where the charge against him — the sexual assault of a child in connection with an alleged underage marriage — was alleged to have occurred.

Pictures showed photo albums and poster-sized pictures that depicted Jessop surrounded by a crowd of children and three young women law enforcement personnel identified as his wives."
Well dang. I thought that wasn't important according to some of the "legal experts" trumpeting how irrelevant location was on the other side of the fence, but apparently, it is important.

It's always been my thought that it was up to Texas to place Merril's "celestial wife" on Eldorado Terra Firma and Merril there too, to make the case stick. That goes for Michael Emack as well, and Raymond Jessop. This salient point didn't seem to figure much in the first trials, but is now making an appearance here, at Merril Jessop's trial, as part of the prosecution's case.

Odd.

Do they know that Merril will try to contend he was elsewhere? To me it has always seemed that I could say, if I were Merril; "How do you know we weren't in Mexico?" After all, no one knows how they got to Mexico and it's not up to Merill to prove his innocence, he is presumed innocent, nor is it up to Merril to incriminate himself. The fact that Texas thinks Merril robbed a bank, but can't say which bank is sort of important.

Don't get confused with the idea that his wife is the bank. She has to be in Texas for it to be a crime, in Texas. If I admit to taking money from a bank, I haven't admitted to robbing it. If I admit to nudity, I don't admit to a crime. If I say I drive my car 200mph, if I did it at Daytona International Speedway, it's not a problem.

There are various considerations such as the "Mann Act," but that's where self incrimination and presumed innocence come in. I'm presumed NOT to have committed a crime, and frankly, as far as the jury knows Merril really conceived a child with his bride at a sort of FLDS "girls gone wild" event on the Yucatan peninsula. She went there, he went there, they meet, the lights go down and so on.

Do I believe that? Well heck no, but it's not up to Merril to have to prove that. For it to be a crime in Texas, it had to happen in Texas. For it to be a "Mann Act" violation, a conspiracy has to be proven. This is not possible without receipts and photographs and cooperative eyewitness testimony. In some places it is still just "bad judgment" to engage in a sex act with a 16 year old, whether it should be or not.

Do I think it will matter to the jury? Nah. A little girl was "assaulted" with an old man's phallus while she cowered in fear of it's mighty and damaging blows. And it had MORE WRINKLES than the 16 year old boy she could have rubbed uglies with, with impugnity.

The jury would kill Merril if they could.


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