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The photo showed Warren Jeffs holding a 12-year-old girl in his arms and kissing her. An attorney said at the time that it was "how a husband would kiss a wife."

The first time I saw it, I reeled away in shock.

This was in 2008, after the raid on an FLDS compound outside Eldorado, a small town in the hills of west Texas.

At the time, I was working with a team of reporters, editors and photographers who'd begun investigating the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints four years earlier.

We'd learned and published so much: the insular ways of some 10,000 members in southern Utah and northern Arizona, the diaspora of men banished by Jeffs, and the children who ran or were sent away to find a way to live without the faith and families they were born to.

We'd also heard about the stipulated marriages, where the "prophet," as Jeffs was known, assigned teenagers and mature women alike to men who may be years or decades older. The brides usually joined households full of other wives and children in the long-established manner of the sect.

As the years went on, reporters and photographers traveled to other FLDS outposts in Colorado, South Dakota and Canada. We got to know other polygamous groups and individuals throughout Utah. And, of course, we followed Jeffs' 2006 arrest outside Nevada after two years on the run.

We learned of the devotion other American polygamists have to their faith and practices. But few, if any, had endorsed the marriage of men to children.

The Texas raid, in which hundreds of children were removed from the Yearning for Zion Ranch, produced a huge amount of evidence, including the photo that helped lead to Jeffs' trial on sexual assault charges involving the 12-year-old, who would be about 17 now, and a then-15-year-old girl who prosecutors say bore his child.

Jeffs has married roughly 80 times, and authorities allege that 10 were to underage girls.

Which brings me to this: In the main, religions are to be respected and adult sexual behavior is a matter of personal choice.

But in Jeffs' case, his domination of, and often cruelty to, the FLDS faithful has in my mind proven him to be a nasty reminder of what can happen when a purported man or woman of God exercises the power of faith in ungodly ways.

We've seen the sexual devastation that too many Catholic priests have wrought on children all over the world, and how men like Jim Jones of the Peoples Temple led 900 of his followers to their deaths by suicide.

Sadly, in my mind, many FLDS faithful retain their belief in the man they consider their prophet, who wields the hammer of complete domination.

On Friday, Jeffs stood in court and, as he is known to do, issued a "statement from God," saying he would "send a scourge upon the counties of prosecutorial zeal to be humbled by sickness and death."

At last, said Brooke Adams, a Tribune reporter who covered polygamy for years, "we can hear him as he is."

It's well, then, that the state of Texas is exercising its temporal power of law. In this case, I put my faith in the women and men of the jury.

Peg McEntee is a news columnist. Reach her at pegmcentee@sltrib.com and facebook.com/pegmcentee.