A polygamous sect leader already serving a 50-year federal prison sentence for orchestrating sex involving children was convicted Friday on state child abuse charges after girls were found in an unventilated trailer he was hauling through Arizona.
Someone alerted authorities about the trailer in August 2022 after seeing small fingers reaching through gaps in the doors. Police stopped Samuel Bateman’s vehicle as he was driving through Flagstaff and found three girls inside, who were ages 11 to 14 at the time. The trailer was enclosed with a makeshift toilet, a sofa and camping chairs.
In the federal case, Bateman was convicted of coercing girls as young as 9 to submit to sex acts with him and other young adults, and for scheming to kidnap girls from protective custody, the story of which is the focus of a Netflix series, “Trust Me: The False Prophet.”
The standout point of this for me is, how does it take 4 years to prepare and try a case against a convict, already in prison, who incompetently represents himself at both trials, that takes 45 minutes for a jury to decide? Some of those girls are adults now. I doubt the guy was constantly twisting the judge’s arm for continuances and motions and all the other disgusting delay tactics real lawyers use. This should have been an open and shut slam dunk case, and if an open and shut case takes this long, and we all know how much longer the actually complex and difficult cases take, that just demonstrates how utterly broken the justice system really is. It’s not just a “little bit slow” broken, it’s not functioning. Justice delayed is justice denied. That’s a non-functional justice system. We don’t have justice in this system. This is not justice.