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

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Disposition and response

Material that narrows or disputes the record

Appellate history

2002-04-11

Conviction affirmed.

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')

Archive classification

This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.

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

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.

Documented coercion mechanisms

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

Cited 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.

Source provenance

Source access and integrity log

This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.

Source and tier basis: https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/ut-court-of-appeals/1340374.html Corpus classification: official-court-judgment; evidentiary role: appellate-judgment. SHA-256 19b8f34d1dcb2f754f86bc4fcbd9c997318f4e2795a413e0a99d56159d0e960d
Retrieval: 2026-07-20 · Preserved; Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger

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