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Bison grazing near fence

www.jupiterimages.com, Photos.com

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Box Elder County deputy attorney Blair Wardle.

Courtesy photo

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John Daniel Kingston

utahgothic.com

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BRIGHAM CITY — Officials are getting frustrated with continued problems with Kingston livestock defeating fences on the family’s huge northern Utah ranch.

The escapes have gone on for at least a year now with misdemeanor fence violations mounting as sometimes hundreds of cattle, even buffalo, roam loose from the Kingstons’ NWR Partnership Ranch near Plymouth, according to the allegations.

But the Kingstons’ lawyer claims it’s more about the prejudice of the Kingstons’ neighbors over the Kingston family’s polygamous beliefs.

But things reached the point last week that the Box Elder County Attorney’s Office filed its ninth pending case against the Kingstons alleging 76 counts of class B misdemeanor fence violations.

That’s one count for each animal found loose one single day in March, said Deputy County Attorney Blair Wardle.

“We absolutely have concerns that someone is going to get injured,” Wardle said. “It’s one of my biggest worries.”

So far no one has been injured in the remote rural area just south of the Utah-Idaho state line, damages confined to trampled crops and fields.

In December Wardle filed a fencing violation case alleging 31 misdemeanor counts.

“That involved 310 head of livestock roaming lose,” he said. “We just filed representative counts, one for every ten animals … We’ve been filing representative counts, trying to give people the benefit of the doubt. But we can only go so far with that approach.”

The nine different cases total more than 200 counts now pending in the Box Elder County Justice Court in Brigham City, with pretrial conferences set for this week.

And Kingston lawyer Laura Fuller says she’s ready to combine them all into one case and go to trial.

“My client has pleaded not guilty and at trial we will be proven innocent,” she said. Her client is John Daniel Kingston, listed in court documents as the family representative over the NWR Ranch, with a Salt Lake City mailing address the same as that of the offices of Kingston lawyers Paul and Carl Kingston.

Fuller said the Kingstons have been treated unfairly by their neighbors in the Plymouth and Portage area abutting the NWR Ranch because of the notoriety in the past of Kingston court cases involving polygamy.

Police investigating claims are leaning toward the neighbors’ accounts, she said, and giving less weight to Kingston claims that it’s not always their livestock getting loose, but animals owned by the neighbors as well. Only the Kingstons have been charged with fencing violations, she said.

“Absolutely it has to do with prejudice over polygamy,” Fuller said.

There are longstanding issues involved, she said, including disputes over property lines, access easements, and leases and water rights.

The Kingstons and their polygamous lifestyle became well known publicly some 20 years ago, with cases involving runaway teens fleeing arranged marriages, sometimes to uncles and nephews.

The clan’s lucrative business holdings in three states have also been publicized. Some of the most extensive media coverage occurred during the run-up to the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City when John Daniel Kingston was prosecuted in 1999 for child abuse in punishing his 16-year-old daughter for fleeing an arranged marriage. Media from across the country covered the proceedings in Brigham City’s 1st District Court.

Fuller points to the December 2013 ruling by Utah federal Judge Clark Waddoups that essentially decriminalized polygamy, calling Utah’s bigamy statute unconstitutional and now limited to fraudulently obtained multiple marriage licenses instead of cohabitation for religious reasons.