SAN ANGELO, Texas (ABC 4 News) - A jury has found Warren Jeffs guilty on two counts of sex abuse.
The jury announced the verdict in a San Angelo, Texas court on Thursday afternoon, just hours after closing arguments.
Jeffs was convicted on two counts of child sexual abuse stemming from marriages to two under-aged girls, one 15 years old and the other only 12 years old.
In an odd turn of events, Jeffs was allowed to deliver a 30-minute closing argument, since he was representing himself. Instead, Jeffs sat silent in the court room, except for a moment when he muttered "I am at peace."
Jeffs fired his attorneys on the day the trial was to begin, and Judge Barbara Walther allowed Jeffs to represent himself.
Evidence presented at trial included DNA proving that Jeffs fathered a child with the 15-year-old, and audio recordings of Jeffs explaining sexual activity to one of the girls.
In his own defense, Jeffs called only one witness, an FLDS church member who read from the Book of Mormon. The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is not affiliated with the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as the "Mormon" church.
Jeffs is the leader and president of the FLDS sect, which split from the mainstream Mormon faith in the late 1800s.
The charges against Jeffs came from a raid at the FLDS compound in 2008, when federal and local law enforcement agents rushed into the settlement located just outside of El Dorado, a small community in central Texas.
Officers were acting on a tip that young girls were being forced to marry older men against their will. That tip later proved to be a hoax, but evidence gathered from the raid prompted the charges against their leader who was already in Utah facing similar charges. Jeffs was convicted of rape as an accomplice in 2007, but that verdict was later vacated by the Utah Supreme Court on a technicality.
Jeffs was later extradited to Arizona for similar charges, but those charges were later dropped.
Jeffs now faces the possibility of life in prison.
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