United States: Self-proclaimed prophet convicted of adultery and gross lewdness after assigning half his sect's women to himself as 'spiritual wives'

Proceedings

1. 1819-11-01 · trial, conviction and sentence

   Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, sitting at York (District of Maine). Indicted on multiple counts of adultery and open and gross lewdness arising from the sect's 'spiritual wifery' practice, Cochran was tried at York in May 1819; he fled before the verdict and was recaptured in October 1819 by Rishworth Jordan and John Banks. In November 1819 he was sentenced to eighteen days' solitary confinement followed by four years' hard labor at the state prison in Charlestown, Massachusetts.

Documented coercion mechanisms

• invented doctrine of 'spiritual wifery,' under which Cochran, as the sect's prophet, assigned women to men as spiritual husbands and wives and could reassign them at his own discretion, with about half of the group's women assigned to himself at one point or another
• dissolution of followers' existing legal marriages framed as required by the doctrine, replacing them with Cochran-assigned pairings
• oath-bound secrecy enforced by threats that a follower's name would be 'blotted out of the book of life' and that they would suffer eternal damnation for divulging the sect's practices
• induced trance/prostration states ('lick up the dust at his feet') as part of Cochran's control over recruits