SAN ANTONIO, Texas | Wed Dec 1, 2010 4:15pm EST
SAN ANTONIO, Texas (Reuters) - Polygamist leader Warren Jeffs, whose rape conviction in Utah was overturned on appeal in July, has been extradited to Texas, where he was ordered held without bond on Wednesday on sexual assault and bigamy charges.
Jeffs, 54, whose word was considered God's will by thousands of followers, is the self-proclaimed prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a breakaway Mormon sect known to practice illegal plural marriages.
Jeffs was indicted by a Texas grand jury in July 2008 following a raid on an FLDS ranch near the tiny west Texas town of Eldorado. He is charged with bigamy and with sexual assault involving two girls, aged 12 and 13, whom he allegedly took as wives.
All three counts are felonies that carry penalties ranging from five to 99 years in prison if convicted.
State authorities removed more than 400 children from the FLDS compound at the time of the raid, sparking a child custody battle that gripped the nation with lurid allegations of adolescent brides and teenage pregnancies. But the children were all later returned to relatives.
The mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the official name of the Mormon faith, renounced polygamy more than a century ago as Utah was seeking statehood and tries to distance itself from splinter groups that still espouse it.
FLDS men typically marry one legal wife while taking others as their "spiritual wives" -- a practice that attempts to skirt the law and entitles the women and their children to various welfare benefits.
Female members of the sect wear long, pioneer-style dresses, keep their hair in long-braided plaits and are raised to be submissive to their husbands. Church members are generally suspicious of outsiders.
Revered as infallible by some and reviled as power-crazed by others, Jeffs has been characterized by his lawyers as an "unpopular religious figure" unfairly singled out for prosecution on the basis of unorthodox beliefs and teachings.
He spent 15 months on the run and made the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list of fugitives before his August 2006 arrest near Las Vegas.
Jeffs was convicted in Utah in September 2007 on two counts of first-degree felony rape as an accomplice, stemming from a 2001 marriage between a 14-year-old girl and her 19-year-old cousin performed by Jeffs over the girl's objections.
At the time of the April 2008 raid on the sect's ranch in Texas, he was serving a prison sentence of 10 years to life in the Utah case and awaiting trial on a similar charge in Arizona, which was later dropped.
The Utah Supreme Court threw out his conviction in July of this year and ordered a new trial, ruling the presiding judge had given faulty instructions.
Last week, Utah's high court ruled Jeffs could be extradited to Texas, a move defense lawyers said would effectively end the case against him in Utah by denying his rights to a speedy retrial.
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said Jeffs was picked up in Utah by Texas Rangers on Tuesday night and "escorted into the state," where he was booked into the county jail in San Angelo, about 200 miles northwest of San Antonio.
Twelve other FLDS men from the Yearning for Zion Ranch near Eldorado were indicted on charges ranging from setting up sham marriages to bigamy and child sexual assault. Seven of those have either pleaded guilty or been convicted and have been sentenced to prison.
(Writing by Steve Gorman; Editing by Jerry Norton)
