A Texas appeals court has upheld the child sexual assault conviction of a member of the FLDS polygamist sect.
The San Angelo Standard-News reports that
The Texas Third Court of Appeals issued a ruling Friday affirming the conviction of Allan Eugene Keate, 60, a member of Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, who was charged with sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl in 2004 when Keate was 53.
Keate was sentenced to 33 years in prison in December 2009. His case was appealed in February 2010. […]
Keate complained that FLDS church records that were used shouldn’t have been admitted for constitutional reasons, but the court believed the documents had been properly authenticated and didn’t violate any constitutional rights.
Additionally, Keate argued the testimony of two witnesses, former FLDS member Carolyn Jessop and clinical psychologist Larry Beall, was not good on grounds of relevance, prejudicial effect of the testimony, qualifications of the witnesses as experts, and reliability of the experts’ opinions.
The court opined that their testimonies were good on all of those grounds.
The primary assertion’s in Keate’s appeals were his suggestion that the girl could have been artificially inseminated or impregnated, and that the assault could have happened outside of Texas.
Keate is one of twelve men indicted on evidence obtained in the April, 2008 raid on the FLDS sect’s Yearning for Zion Ranch.