Wayne Bent appeal upheld

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joe sz
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Wayne Bent appeal upheld

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Justice served? Members speak on Union County sect, leader's appeal

The Taos News
By Chandra Johnson
Monday, August 22, 2011



As the Eighth Judicial District waits to hear if the New Mexico Supreme Court will review the case of a church leader convicted of sexually touching underage girls in 2006, many in the church are decrying what they consider a miscarriage of justice in the case.

The 2008 conviction of then 67-year-old church leader Wayne Bent was reversed after the New Mexico Court of Appeals upheld the defense's claims that the grand jury's term was expired when it indicted him.

Wayne Bent is currently serving 18 years at Los Lunas Correctional Center. But for Wayne Bent's son, Jeff Bent, and fellow church members Ashley Pickle and Bethabara Travesser, that reason is just the tip of the iceberg for problems in a case that's really about freedom of religion.

The three drove from Union County to tell The Taos News their side of the story last week. Jeff Bent says the media frenzy surrounding his father tainted any chance of a fair trial, especially since the removal of the children came on the heels of a British film about the sect, released in the U.S. through the National Geographic Channel called, "The End of the World Cult."

Once the film aired, Jeff Bent says his father became more caricature than man.

"My father's trial had all the aspects of a legal lynching," Jeff Bent said Aug. 9. "It was a foregone conclusion that they were going to get the cult leader."

Jeff Bent and others that follow the Union County-based The Lord Our Righteousness Church are adamant that their religion and way of life in no way matches up with the term "cult."

Rather, Bent says, the church is more accurately characterized as a Christian sect, as there is no coercion, polygamy or other hallmarks of a cult present on the compound that locals nicknamed "Strong City."


Symbolism and belief


So what exactly does a member of The Lord Our Righteousness Church believe?

"We would consider ourselves biblically oriented Christians. What sets us apart is that what most Christians believe is the future, we believe is happening now," Jeff Bent said. "People are naturally afraid of what they don't understand. The term "cult" evokes memories of Jonestown, Waco or Heaven's Gate. So we were pigeonholed early on."

But doesn't the church's leader, Wayne Bent, claim to be the messiah? Yes, but Jeff Bent says not in the way most people think. Wayne Bent, or Michael Travesser, as he became known after 2000, isn't a messiah in the sense that he holds supreme authority over other church members.

"People with religious beliefs stumble on this," Bent said. "Michael, to us, is the same spirit that inhabited the body of Jesus Christ. So, yes, he was the visible head [of our church], the one who announced the anointing to us, the one who God worked through to bring us this message, but we are all with him in it and part of it, just as he is."

And that spirit, Jeff Bent says, the one that church members believed entered the body of Wayne Bent in 2000, is also present in all members of the church, who translate the word "messiah" literally to mean, "anointed."

"That's what happened at Pentecost, when they all received the spirit. That was the anointing," Bethabara Travesser said during the interview.

In a church that relies highly on symbolism to express faith, followers use rituals and life practices to demonstrate their devotion to God, not to Wayne Bent as a human.

What about the prophecies that the world would end on Oct. 31, 2007 and again on Dec. 15, 2007?

"No one ever said that the world was going to end on that day," Travesser said. "That was an invention of the documentary."

Rather, the dates given coincided with the end of a prophecy found in the Book of Daniel, which states that after 490 years, believers will complete six items, including "atone for wickedness" and "bring everlasting righteousness."

Oct. 31, 2007 also marked 490 years since Martin Luther unleashed The Great Schism with the Catholic Church.

"It was a celebration and a chance for us to start fresh," Travesser said. "In that way, it was an end of sin for us."

Another active symbol in the church is the kind of marriage one chooses, but it doesn't mean that all marriages are dissolved as a condition of membership, Jeff Bent said.

"Families are not dissolved, though many people have dissolved what we would call earthly marriages," Jeff Bent said. "If you're unhappy in a relationship, we believe you don't have to be."

But perhaps the most perplexing symbol for many outsiders is the symbol of nudity sometimes used in healing rituals — the kind many young women participated in with Wayne Bent that eventually led to charges.

Ashley Pickle was one of several girls who chose to lie naked in Wayne Bent's presence for the purposes of a healing ritual.

She was not involved in the case, as she was of age at the time. Now 24 and still an active church member, the allegations that she was brainwashed or that she was pressured into the ritual upset her.

"We view nakedness as a vulnerability before God," Pickle said. "I wouldn't go up to just any man in my church and say, 'Would you pray naked with me?' and I wouldn't support that."

Moreover, Pickle is insistent — just as the two underage girls who testified at trial were — that nothing about the ritual or Wayne Bent's conduct was sexual.

In the one documented case where Wayne Bent was not wearing clothes, he was still covered with a sheet while performing the ritual on a teenage girl, which leads Jeff Bent to rail against claims that his father ever "laid naked with" underage girls, and Travesser agrees.

"I've been in this church 20 years. Often in our public gatherings, it's been customary to do this ritual while fully clothed," Travesser said.


Legal questions


While the church members have explanations and religious reasoning behind the actions that led to the trial, Jeff Bent says religion was not allowed in the courtroom.

"We were never able to get the facts across," Jeff Bent said. "From the beginning, it was a foregone conclusion that they were going to get the cult leader."

It's true that the legal handling of the case could raise several legal questions moving forward. The problem most in the foreground of the case is the fact that the grand jury's expired term was disregarded by the court.

The court of appeals overturned Wayne Bent's conviction based on that fact, stating that when the jury heard his case in May 2008, the term had been expired for more than three months.

"At the hearing on Defendant's motion to quash the indictment, the prosecutor stated to the court that the grand jury's term had been verbally extended by District Judge Sam Sánchez without the entry of any written order. We are left to rely on assertions by counsel and the district court that it happened," the opinion reads.

Additional problems were less official. Wayne Bent's former defense attorney, Sarah Montoya, told The Taos News last week that it was true that Judge Gerald Baca suppressed multiple defense witnesses from testifying about the church's beliefs to put the alleged offenses in the context of a religious practice.

Montoya said he also required that the trial last no longer than two weeks since Baca didn't win his retention election and was leaving the bench.

"Who are we to tell people how to practice religion?" Montoya said in a phone interview. "If you're going to take that argument, why aren't Catholic priests indicted for serving alcohol to minors?"

But Eighth Judicial District Attorney Donald Gallegos said that such witness weren't relevant to the case at hand.

"Their beliefs do nothing to provide a legal justification or defense for what happened," Gallegos said.

According to the text of the statute, criminal sexual contact is only constituted when "intimate" body parts are touched, including "the primary genital area, groin, buttocks, anus or breast."

The underage girls who testified at Bent's trial were each shown a Barbie doll wearing a bikini at the time and both testified that Bent didn't touch them in any place covered with the bikini.

Pickle also said that the touching was confined to her sternum, the area around her collarbones and her stomach.

Other issues include the involvement of the state Children, Youth and Families Department. Originally, the minors involved in the rituals were removed from the compound near Clayton and Wayne Bent was charged with inappropriately touching three girls.

Gallegos said the charges involving one of the girls were dropped because her story became "inconsistent."

But CYFD documents provided to The Taos News in the case reveal that a deal was struck between the state and the girls' parents. In an unsigned initial draft of the agreement, the girl was prohibited from "lying naked" with Wayne Bent completely.

The official document, signed and notarized, states that the girl was free to interact with Wayne Bent as she pleased so long as it was "in the presence of one or both" of her parents, who are active members of the church.

Anaiah Travesser, the girl's mother, refused to sign the first draft of the agreement based on her daughter's religious rights and that Wayne Bent had never abused her daughter.

This is all well and good, Gallegos said, but it still would not have changed the case in the eyes of a jury.

"Nothing they can say or those witnesses can say would have changed the outcome," Gallegos said. "I can see their side of it. They come out to this corner of the world and believe what they believe and here comes the big, bad state. I can see that. But it still doesn't stick in their heads that it violates the law."

Gallegos also dismisses Montoya's contention that the jury should have been sequestered instead of being allowed to go home over the weekend before reaching a verdict.

"You cannot tell me that they didn't go home and watch something that swayed their opinions," Montoya said. "Had they been sequestered, we would've had a different outcome."

Gallegos disagrees.

"I think that's kind of unfair," Gallegos said. "We have to have faith in the people who do jury service that when they take an oath, they're going to uphold it."

Until the supreme court decides whether to review the case, Jeff Bent and others in the church think the reversal will be upheld.

"We don't fault anyone for looking at us the way they do from afar. We came right on the heels of the Warren Jeffs case," Jeff Bent said. "But this is an injustice to the freedom of religion."

That's a perception The Lord Our Righteousness Church may have to deal with indefinitely until something changes.

"People roll their eyes at me when I give this argument," Montoya said. "But they were minding their own business, and the world just came crashing in on them."

cjohnson@taosnews.com

https://www.taosnews.com/stories/justic ... ppeal,9306
ex
Posts: 857
Joined: Sun Jan 06, 2008 9:18 am

Re: Wayne Bent appeal upheld

Unread post by ex »

this poor cult members who cant practice theire religon. greg simons would sound like jeff bent in a similar situation. oh i forgot jz knight is not ramtha and ramtha cant appear before a judge. and the bodyguard who raped that is no rape. why don't we allow cults to write theire own laws? and handel places like rse like littel states with littel students drinking littel wine all so harmless and jolly.
Vanilla
Posts: 586
Joined: Mon Apr 11, 2011 10:51 pm
Location: Rome, Italy

Re: Wayne Bent appeal upheld

Unread post by Vanilla »

My mother was touched by a priest ---and when she told her mother --she said to her daughter, "you should be lucky you were touched by the hands of god".
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