Documentary record Bound by Fear
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Conviction Christian institutions & contexts Latter-day Saint movements Salt Lake City, Utah, USA · 1999

United States: Kingston Order leader convicted of incest after a doctrinal plural 'marriage' to his niece

Record class

Core record

Evidence status

Convicted

Authority role

leader within the Kingston clan ('The Order' / Latter Day Church of Christ)

Organization

Latter Day Church of Christ (Kingston clan / 'The Order')

Spiritual nexus

Although the perpetrator was the victim's uncle, the operative coercion was doctrinal, not familial: the Order's plural-marriage teaching and clan hierarchy assigned her to him as a 'wife'. This is the doctrinal-coercion exception to the family-nexus exclusion — the belief system, not the kinship, is what delivered her into his control.

  • Religious marriage or family control
  • Prophecy or divine command
  • Institutional obedience or isolation

Evidence structure

Proceedings

  1. 1999-06-01 · jury conviction; affirmed on appeal

    Utah state court; Utah Court of Appeals. David Ortell Kingston was convicted by a jury in June 1999 of three counts of incest and one count of unlawful sexual conduct for taking his 16-year-old niece as a plural 'wife' under the group's religious doctrine. The Utah Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction in April 2002. A separate prosecution of the girl's father — who beat her when she fled — was a family-violence matter and is not part of this record.

Appellate history

  1. 2002-04-11 · undefined

    undefined

Documented coercion mechanisms

  • the group's plural-marriage doctrine assigning a 16-year-old as a 'wife'
  • clan religious hierarchy

Primary record

Sources

official court judgment appellate judgment State v. Kingston, Utah Court of Appeals (11 Apr. 2002), affirming the 1999 convictions.

The appellate opinion affirming the incest and unlawful-sexual-conduct convictions.

Related record

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