Some articles comparing Go Set a Watchman and To Kill a Mockingbird
The following story about "Go Set a Watchman" contains spoilers. Repeat: The following story contains spoilers.
(CNN)When we last met Jean Louise "Scout" Finch, in Harper Lee's classic "To Kill a Mockingbird," she was 8 years old and had just been saved from an attack from "low-down skunk" Bob Ewell, thanks to the reclusive Boo Radley.
An older narrator -- Finch looking back on the Depression-era events of the novel -- reassesses her earlier harsh thoughts about Radley, whom she, her older brother Jem and friend Dill had considered a "malevolent phantom."
"Atticus was right," Scout thinks. "One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them."
Readers may want to think about that line as they read Lee's "new" novel, "Go Set a Watchman," because standing in the shoes of some familiar characters may be uncomfortable. The following contains spoilers about "Go Set a Watchman."
Originally an early version of "Mockingbird," the book was discovered last year, according to Lee's attorney, and is being released Tuesday. "Watchman" begins with a 26-year-old Jean Louise returning to midcentury Maycomb, Alabama, at the beginning of the civil rights era.
Though an instant bestseller -- publisher HarperCollins has printed more than 2 million copies -- an early release of chapter 1 and a New York Times review caused concern among fans of Lee's gently moralistic "Mockingbird," which is a staple of high school reading lists and has sold more than 30 million copies.
What's different?
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Go Set a Watchman review – more complex than Harper Lee's original classic, but less compelling
Scout has lost her swagger and Atticus fans will be shocked by a satisfying novel that nonetheless vindicates the direction taken by Harper Lee’s classic debut
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Why Go Set a Watchman is a much better novel than To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee's newly released novel may not win another Pulitzer, but it's far more honest and mature about the complexity of racism in the South.
The mistake made by so many fans of Mockingbird was to assume that a passion for justice and the rule of law went alongside a commitment to racial equality, and a determination to overcome prejudice. Sometimes, it didn’t. Civil rights activist Al Sharpton has said that Watchman, “reflects the reality of finding out that a lot of those we thought were on our side harboured some different personal feelings”.
This is what makes Watchman better than Mockingbird. It’s not better written, I doubt it’s going to win another Pulitzer, and since its release the list of actors queueing up to play Atticus in Mockingbird 2got a lot shorter. But Watchman is a lot more honest. It doesn’t feed white America the comforting version of civil rights history where the bad guys are easily identifiable ignorant hicks, the good guys are heroic and noble white men with impeccable manners, and the black people are all subservient, respectful and endlessly patient.
Mockingbird is a child’s book, told by a child. Watchman is for grown-ups. It asks serious questions about what racism is. And it comes at a time when American desperately needs a grown-up conversation about race.
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Go Set a Watchman, released worldwide this week, was initially portrayed as a long-lost second novel by Harper Lee. But reports leading up to its publication have made clear that Watchman is more accurately seen as the early first draft of Lee’s classic work, To Kill a Mockingbird, which won the Pulitzer Prize for its depiction of racism in the deep south of the United States during the Great Depression.
As it turns out, many passages can be found in both of the books, almost word-for-word.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald is famous for saying that there are no second acts in American lives, but we seem to have granted Harper Lee a blockbuster: her second novel (or her first, depending on whose story you believe), Go Set a Watchman, was a bestseller before it even appeared in print.
The soap opera surrounding its “discovery” and publication could be a novel in itself, with a reader’s choice of villains, knaves and Lee as the sprightly hero. Leaked previews of Watchman stirred the pot even more; we have to get used to Atticus as more of a Strom Thurmond than a St. Francis.
The prepublication pageant, however, had us looking in the wrong direction and asking the wrong questions. Written in the 1950s, both Mockingbird and Watchman offer windows into one Southern writer’s grasp of race relations at a certain moment in history. But that moment is certainly gone now, andMockingbird is a formula for a nostalgic backward look rather than a prescription for action in the present. (Some say the novel has always been a way for white audiences to console themselves into thinking that a fine speech could be equated with doing the right thing.)
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In transforming “Watchman” into “Mockingbird,” Lee produced an unrecognizably different novel, even though Atticus Finch and Scout are at the center of both. But this is not the Atticus readers thought they knew. Immortalized in the film version by Gregory Peck – heroic defense attorney for Tom Robinson, a black man convicted by an all-white jury of raping a white woman in Lee’s fictional town of Maycomb – Atticus personified Justice itself, even when the verdict is guilty on all counts. Largely because of Atticus, “Mockingbird” became all but mandatory reading for American schoolchildren. Ask college students what novels they have read and, after much head scratching, the one they typically will come up with is that sentimental standby “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
It’s seldom noticed that “Mockingbird” does not mean to African-Americans what it means to whites. Bryan Stevenson, a professor of law at New York University and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala., has spent much of his life doing what Atticus did once – defending African-Americans in the judicial system. Indeed, he did what Atticus could not do: He won the freedom of a black man who had been on death row for six years – a man, no less, from Monroeville, Ala., the model for Harper Lee’s Maycomb. Stevenson is black, and he sees “Mockingbird” as something less than a civic catechism. In an email Tuesday he wrote:
“I do think we have romanticized ‘Mockingbird’ in a way that is in tension with the reality of racial discrimination in this country. That legal organizations name awards after Atticus Finch is what provokes me. It’s as if the fate of the wrongly convicted client who dies from a lack of hope is irrelevant to the nobility and success of the attorney’s effort. I identified with Tom Robinson when I read the story and couldn’t celebrate Atticus in quite the same way that others did.”
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'Go Set a Watchman' is trifling compared to 'Mockingbird'
Those who revere “Atticus Finch” of Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” can take solace from Lee’s “Go Set a Watchman,” its ”companion piece.“ “Watchman” is not a sequel; the Atticus of “Mockingbird” did not twist into some racist caricature, a minor Senator Claghorn bellowing antebellum states rights psalms and loving the “negro,” so long as he knows his place. “Go Set a Watchman” is an earlier draft of what became “Mockingbird,” a testament to why the best authors have the best editors. In this alternate universe, Atticus got Tom Robinson an acquittal, and Jem and Dill are remembered characters; much more time is spent with the high-corseted Aunt Alexandria.
I’m assuming readers have read “To Kill a Mockingbird” because if you haven’t there’s little reason to read “Go Set a Watchman.” Ninety percent of its value and pleasure is contrasting its harsh, racial tale with the subtle, more-piercing masterpiece. “Watchman” reads like an extremely talented novelist’s first draft, bereft of sufficient characterization and frequented by childhood flashbacks barely connected to the plot. Yet, if “Mockingbird” has been read, the reader will enjoy “Watchman.” The first 100 pages contain the literary charms of “Mockingbird,” as we follow Jean Louise Finch, once called Scout, now a 26-year-old career woman in NYC (I’m not sure her actual career was mentioned, maybe she’s an artist of some type) heading home via train for a vacation to Maycomb. In the novel’s first third, we pleasantly reunite with Maycomb, and are introduced to Henry Clinton, Jean Louise’s lawyer boyfriend. There’s delightful passages of Jean Louise “folding herself up into a wall” in the train “roomette,” and a late-night visit to Finch’s Landing by Jean Louise and Henry.
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Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman can teach us about race and living in Hong Kong
Zuraidah Ibrahim says though differing in tone and style, both of her books, published 55 years apart, are a searing reflection on race and the problems of being different
If you haven't read To Kill a Mockingbird, you must. If you have and haven't yet picked up author Harper Lee's second book, which was published earlier this month, don't bother.
At least, that was how I felt when I finished reading Go Set a Watchman, the most pre-ordered book in publisher HarperCollins' history. It was heart-achingly disappointing if you had gone into it as I did, wanting to reconnect with the characters in Mockingbird as they moved into adulthood in this sequel, published 55 years later. I did not want to lose the hope the first book offered - that young people, through watching the examples of the adults in their lives, learn that one can overcome the barriers of race and difference. In Mockingbird, one came to believe in a world where we are judged not by the colour of our skin but the content of our character, to quote the late civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King Jnr.
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Lee's second book is perhaps more in tune with our morally ambiguous times. Fifty years after the US Civil Rights Act, racial profiling still goes on. Mob lynchings may have ended, but hate crimes have not: last month's murder of nine people in a black church in South Carolina was just one extreme example of white supremacists in action.
To Kill a Mockingbird gave many Americans a moral compass of sorts as they struggled with the challenge of bringing equality to their society.
Go Set a Watchman, while it had the same characters, is a more despondent look at the chains of convention and conformity. Stylistically, it is also a raw, more awkward endeavour of a first-time author. In all, it isn't a pleasant experience, but it should give readers a sharp jolt about their own prejudices and world view of race. And maybe, just maybe, they will have the honesty to admit that inside all of us resides a racist. ………..
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When in the fall of 2014, Harper Collins announced it would publish a long-forgotten manuscript purportedly written by Harper Lee, author of the beloved To Kill a Mockingbird, America’s response was mixed. Fans of Lee’s original masterpiece eagerly looked forward to reading this unearthed treasure. But because the famously reclusive Lee, now 89-years-old and in poor health (a stroke in 2007 left her largely deaf, blind, and with a failing memory), so firmly refused to communicate with the media or to publish another word after her wildly successful first novel, critics suspected foul play. Why, after so many years, and towards the end of her life, would Harper Lee suddenly agree to release a manuscript she had declined to publish for decades?
The reception of this controversial second book, Go Set a Watchman, released in July of 2015, has met with equally mixed reviews. However varied their opinions of the story, critics seem to agree on one aspect of the work: one can’t read Watchman without comparing it to, or at least mentioning, To Kill a Mockingbird. For one, Mockingbird so strongly impacted society at the time of its release, winning Lee a Pulitzer Prize and the movie adaptation of her novel three Oscars, and it has remained a staple of high school curricula and American culture ever since.
Moreover, although written first, Go Set a Watchman is the literary continuation of its predecessor; it takes place in the fictional Southern town of Maycomb, Alabama and contains essentially the same cast of characters. It also refers in passing to crucial events from To Kill a Mockingbird, including the pivotal Tom Robinson trial. Without understanding the emotional importance of these references, a reader cannot fully comprehend a grown-up Scout’s evolving relationship with her father or her inner turmoil over the changing culture of the South, both of which form the basis of the story in Watchman.
Unfortunately, to compare Go Set a Watchman with To Kill a Mockingbird is to acknowledge an inferior piece of literature. Although signs of Lee’s skill shine through in her characteristic sense of humor, conveyed through sharp observations about her world and colloquial turns of phrase, her writing here is thinner and her characters seem flatter and less developed. The overall storyline, too, is less compelling and lacks the cohesiveness and sense of suspense that defined To Kill a Mockingbird. Ultimately, Watchman does not pack the emotional punch that made that first novel so powerful.
Given the history behind these two works, it should come as no surprise that To Kill a Mockingbird outstrips its companion in quality. A new documentary from First Run Features, entitled Harper Lee: From Mockingbird to Watchman, details the life and work of Harper Lee through photographs and video, clips from archived interviews, and the commentary of notable writers, historians, celebrities, and friends, including Oprah Winfrey, Walley Lamb, Mary Badham, and Lee’s elderly sister, Alice. According to this documentary, Mockingbird wouldn’t exist if not for a Christmas gift from Lee’s fellow Southerners and good friends in New York, Joy and Michael Brown. Knowing that she hoped to become an author, the Browns financed a one-year vacation from her job as an airline reservationist to write whatever she wanted; the result was Watchman and a collection of stories, called Atticus, which would eventually develop into To Kill a Mockingbird. …….
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Review: Harper Lee’s ‘Go Set a Watchman’ Gives Atticus Finch a Dark Side
We remember Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s 1960 classic, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” as that novel’s moral conscience: kind, wise, honorable, an avatar of integrity who used his gifts as a lawyer to defend a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in a small Alabama town filled with prejudice and hatred in the 1930s. As indelibly played by Gregory Peck in the 1962 movie, he was the perfect man — the ideal father and a principled idealist, an enlightened, almost saintly believer in justice and fairness. In real life, people named their children after Atticus. People went to law school and became lawyers because of Atticus.
Shockingly, in Ms. Lee’s long-awaited novel, “Go Set a Watchman” (due out Tuesday), Atticus is a racist who once attended a Klan meeting, who says things like “The Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people.” Or asks his daughter: “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?”
In “Mockingbird,” a book once described by Oprah Winfrey as “our national novel,” Atticus praised American courts as “the great levelers,” dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.” In “Watchman,” set in the 1950s in the era of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, he denounces the Supreme Court, says he wants his home state “to be left alone to keep house without advice from the N.A.A.C.P.” and describes N.A.A.C.P.-paid lawyers as “standing around like buzzards.”
From Jennifer -- via New Republic:
Here are the individual links:
I am sending a link on articles that New Republic did on Harper Lee and her works.
I found a link that has all the articles listed on one page...I read them in chronological order from oldest to newest.
Here are the individual links:
The Mass-Market Edition of To Kill a Mockingbird Is Dead
Harper Lee’s estate will no longer allow publication of the inexpensive paperback edition that was popular with schools.
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Will Harper Lee's New Book Be Any Good?
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Some supplemental material related to Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer
Thou Shalt Kill
The New York Times Book Review. 108 (Aug. 3, 2003): Arts and Entertainment: p7. From Literature Resource Center.
Copyright:COPYRIGHT 2003 The New York Times Company
SINCE Sept. 11, 2001, Americans have talked a lot about the dark side of religion, but for the most part it isn't religion in America they've had in mind. Jon Krakauer wants to broaden their perspective. In ''Under the Banner of Heaven,'' he enters the obscure world of Mormon fundamentalism to tell a story of, as he puts it, ''faith-based violence.''
In July 1984, in a Utah town called American Fork, Dan Lafferty entered the home of his brother Allen, who was at work, and killed Allen's wife and 15-month-old daughter. Dan, now serving a life sentence, has no remorse about the murders and no trouble explaining them. His older brother, Ron, who assisted in the crime and is now on death row, had received a revelation from God mandating that Brenda and Erica Lafferty be ''removed'' so that, as God put it, ''my work might go forward.'' Brenda Lafferty, a spunky 24-year-old, had been bad-mouthing polygamy and in other ways impeding the fundamentalist mission that had seized Ron and Dan.
Parallels between the Lafferty brothers and Islamic terrorists aren't obvious, and Krakauer doesn't explore them very explicitly. The author of ''Into Thin Air,'' the best-selling account of death on Mount Everest, he is essentially a narrative writer. He mentions Osama bin Laden near the beginning and end of the book and leaves it for readers to draw their own conclusions, with some help from the book jacket's reference to ''Taliban-like theocracies in the American heartland.''
Still, by setting Mormon fundamentalism in its historical and scriptural context, and by powerfully illuminating Dan Lafferty's mind, Krakauer provides enough raw material for a seminar on post-9/11 questions. What drives people toward fundamentalism, and then toward violence? Where is the line between religious fanaticism and insanity? How heavy is the influence of religious history, in particular scripture, as opposed to the material conditions of modern life?
Mormon fundamentalists aren't Mormons in the common sense of the word. They don't belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which abandoned the doctrine of ''plural marriage'' in 1890. Many live in small towns (the ''Taliban-like theocracies'') where men evade anti-bigamy laws by having one lawful wife and additional ''spiritual'' wives. Others -- especially ''independents,'' who belong to no particular fundamentalist sect -- just blend into the landscape. The street preacher who allegedly kidnapped 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart last year and forced her to ''marry'' him was an independent.
Dan and Ron Lafferty weren't born into this world. They were raised as severely pious but mainstream Mormons, and both were married before they flirted with fundamentalism.
Dan went first. It might seem that a man's attraction to a polygamous sub-culture needs little explaining, especially if he comes from a religion that discourages nonmarital sex with inordinate vigor. But Dan's conversion was about more than wanderlust. After his mom-and-pop sandwich business was shut down for lack of a license, leaving his family in a financial bind, he grew ardently averse to government regulation and found backing for this sentiment in the Book of Mormon. It was in this libertarian spirit that he came to reject the Mormon Church's jettisoning of polygamy; church leaders had caved in to an invasive federal government.
Ron, like Dan, turned toward fundamentalism while under economic pressure. The bank was about to foreclose on his home -- he would sometimes break into tears over his family's plight -when Dan convinced him that God wanted him to forsake material goals and become a fundamentalist missionary. Dan also drew his four other brothers into the fold, but there was one problem: Brenda, the wife of his brother Allen. As the Lafferty boys started espousing polygamy and other strange things, Brenda urged the other wives to resist. And Ron's wife took Brenda's advice in spades. She divorced Ron and took the children to Florida. So when Ron's divine revelation about Brenda's ''removal'' arrived, he was in a receptive frame of mind.
Though organized around the Lafferty brothers' crime, ''Under the Banner of Heaven'' recounts the always interesting history of Mormonism, starting with the day in 1823 when the New York visionary and suspected charlatan Joseph Smith met an angel named Moroni. Krakauer wants to show how the Lafferty murder is rooted in the Mormon past. He emphasizes, for example, the doctrine of ''blood atonement,'' stressed by Smith but later dropped by the church.
It's true that Dan Lafferty, while delving into church history, encountered this idea. But it's also true that by then he already harbored volatile grievances and that he had come from a violent background; his father killed the family dog with a baseball bat as family members looked on. Most religions, and certainly the monotheistic ones, have odes to violence in their scriptural past. (See, for example, Deuteronomy.) The question is what makes some people more inclined than others to latch onto these passages.
However valid Krakauer's linkage of past and present, it steepens an already formidable storytelling challenge. The contemporary parts of the book -skipping from the Lafferty case to sketches of two fundamentalist towns to a late-breaking chapter on Elizabeth Smart -- can themselves disorient the reader with disparate detail. (From a strictly literary standpoint, polygamy's main downside is its creation of lots of characters with the same last name.) With long historical sections mixed in, the momentum dissipates further. Almost every section of the book is fascinating in its own right, and together the chapters make a rich picture, but there is little narrative synergy among them.
The book ends near the desert town of Colorado City, Ariz., a bastion of fundamentalism, with DeLoy Bateman, a resident, reflecting on his conversion to atheism. He grants that believers are happy but says happiness isn't as important as being free to think for yourself. He's referring partly to the totalitarian undercurrent of Mormon fundamentalism. (The town's leading prophet tells his flock to avoid television, magazines and newspapers -- and sometimes tells teenage girls whom they should marry.) Still, this, the book's closing note, will be taken by some as a verdict on religion writ large -- especially since, at the moment Bateman notes religion's conduciveness to happiness, he happens to look out over ''a quivering sheen of mirage.''
Certainly the picture of religion presented in the book is unflattering. Linking the Laffertys to Mormon history means stressing its violent and authoritarian aspects. And of course neither of these is an invention of Krakauer's. (Polygamous societies in general tend toward authoritarianism, as the anthropologist Laura Betzig has shown. She attributes this to the need of powerful men to control not just women but the understandably unsettled lower-status males who, through the grim mathematics of polygamy, go mateless.) Still, it would have been nice to see some of religion's upside. Something must explain the vibrancy of mainstream Mormonism, and I doubt it's just the dark energy of residual authoritarianism. Religion, like patriotism, can nurture virtue within the group even while directing hostility beyond it.
Courtroom arguments over Ron Lafferty's sanity impinge on the question of religion from another angle, by questioning the line between religious fervor and pathological delusion. Though believers may find this question offensive, in a way it acquits religion of some charges against it. If there isn't much difference between the talking dog that gave David Berkowitz his marching orders and the ''God'' that visited Ron Lafferty, then for all we know Lafferty, had he not been religious, would have gotten his guidance from another voice.
THE human mind is great at justifying its goals, and it does so by whatever medium is handy, including -- if neither god nor dog seems plausible -- simple moralizing. Dan Lafferty, asked to distinguish himself from Osama bin Laden, says, ''I believe I'm a good person.'' An unfortunately common sentiment. Krakauer writes that ''as a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane . . . there may be no more potent force than religion.'' But sheer instinctive self-righteousness may ultimately be a bigger part of the problem. It is a common denominator of crimes committed in the name of religion, nationalism, racism -- even, sometimes, nihilism.
And it isn't the only element of the Lafferty story with this kind of versatility. Dan and Ron Lafferty saw their quest for security and stature frustrated and then found someone to blame -- a description that, in one sense or another, applies to Mohamed Atta, Timothy McVeigh and the Columbine killers. ''Under the Banner of Heaven'' is an arresting portrait of depravity that may have broader relevance than the author intended.
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Mormon response:
Some book reviewers and religion writers have asked The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for its reaction to a new book by Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith.
Three responses from the Church are given below. The first is a short response from the Church’s Director of Media Relations. The second is a summary by Richard E. Turley, managing director of the Family and Church History Department and an authority on Church history and doctrine. The third is a review by Robert L. Millet, Professor of Religious Understanding at Brigham Young University. ….
Essay
Mormonism and the Problem of Jon Krakauer
Religion & Politics
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Recent news and articles relating to Mormons:
Deseret News -March 10, 2016
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Los Angeles Times -March 10. 2016
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DOJ Lawsuit Shakes Foundation of Warren Jeffs' Corrupt Polygamous Mormon Sect …February 11, 2016
For the past month, the inner workings of the polygamous Mormon breakaway sect, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints or FLDS, have been exposed in a discrimination lawsuit in federal court in downtown Phoenix. The case threatens the existence of a FLDS community—the border towns of Hildale, Utah and Colorado City, Arizona often referred to as the “twin cities.” At least the way it has operated for years. In fact, this lawsuit may finally bring an end to the community’s corrupt enterprise that has existed for decades under the guise of a religion.
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It's Time to Legalize Polygamy - POLITICO Magazine
www.politico.com/.../gay-marriage-decision-polygamy-119469
Politico
Jun 26, 2015 - It's Time to Legalize Polygamy. Why group marriage is the next horizon of social liberalism. By Fredrik deBoer. June 26, 2015
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Los Angeles Times - March 10, 2016
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The Big Question: What's the history of polygamy, and how ...
www.independent.co.uk › News › World › Africa
The Independent
Jan 5, 2010 - Some anthropologists believe that polygamy has been the norm through human history. In 2003, New Scientist magazine suggested that, until 10,000 years ago, most children had been sired by comparatively few men. Variations in DNA, it said, showed that the distribution of X chromosomes suggested that a few men seem to have had greater input into the gene pool than the rest. By contrast most women seemed to get to pass on their genes. Humans, like their primate forefathers, it said, were at least "mildly polygynous".
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Polygamy; a Historical Background A fact sheet prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families, May 8, 2006
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Judge rejects plea from Utah prisoner Ron Lafferty facing firing squad Legal Monitor Worldwide. (Nov. 3, 2015): News: From General OneFile. Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 SyndiGate Media Inc. http://www.syndigate.info/
Full Text: A federal judge has denied a request by condemned killer Ron Lafferty to halt his federal case so he can pursue a number of legal claims in state court. Attorneys for Lafferty filed an amended petition in July. Lafferty, 75, says the state mishandled or destroyed parts of a bloodied kitchen drape that was used as evidence in the case, and that Utah's methods of execution firing squad and lethal injection violate Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment. But U.S. District Judge Dee Benson denied the petition Friday. Lafferty is on Utah's death row after a 1985 conviction for the murders of his sister-in-law Brenda Wright Lafferty and her 15-month-old daughter, Erica, in Utah County. The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals later overturned the conviction and ordered a new trial after finding that the wrong standards had been used to evaluate Lafferty's mental competency. Lafferty was convicted and sentenced to death again for the murders in 1996. According to trial testimony, Lafferty ordered the slayings after receiving a revelation from God. His brother Dan Lafferty carried out the 1984 murder by slashing their victims' throats with a 10inch boning knife at their home in American Fork. Dan Lafferty also was convicted of murder, but he is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. [c] 2015 Legal Monitor Worldwide. All Rights Reserved. Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. ( Syndigate.info ). Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition) "Judge rejects plea from Utah prisoner Ron Lafferty facing firing squad." Legal Monitor Worldwide 3 Nov. 2015. General OneFile. Web. 11 Mar. 2016. URL http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? id=GALE%7CA433485874&v=2.1&u=plan_smcol&it=r&p=GPS&sw=w&asid=a032a285db376103609467346ea4e560 Gale Document Number: GALE|A433485874
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Utah family's deaths came after obsession with Lafferty ...
www.sltrib.com › News
The Salt Lake Tribune
Jan 28, 2015 - Thirty years ago, Dan Lafferty and his brother grew their hair long, called themselves prophets and claimed God told them to kill their sister-in-law and her baby after she resisted her husband's entry into a radical polygamous group.
Kristi Strack was 6 years old when it happened, but police said she developed an obsession with the case that turned into a close years-long friendship with the imprisoned man.
The mindset of Strack and her husband, Benjamin, grew increasingly bizarre, culminating with a belief that the apocalypse was near just before they killed themselves with a drug overdose and took their three children with them.
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Rulon Jeffs Obituary - St. George, UT | The Salt Lake Tribune
Legacy.com
President Rulon T. Jeffs HILDALE, UTAH – On September 8, 2002, Rulon Timpson Jeffs, President of The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, died of illness incident to age at the Dixie Regional Medical Center in St. George, Utah. President Jeffs was born December 6, 1909 in Salt Lake City, Utah, a son of David William Ward and Nettie Lenora Timpson Jeffs. He was a graduate of the LDS Business College and was an accountant by trade. He retired from his accounting practice in 1984, and moved to Hildale, Utah in September of 1998 in order to better serve the members of the faith of which he was leader. The members of the Fundamentalist Church revered President Jeffs as their spiritual leader and prophet. He first became affiliated with the Fundamentalist Church in the late 1930s, when the religious association was known as the Priesthood Work. He became a leader of the Priesthood Work in the 1940s, when he was appointed a member of its priesthood council. In 1942, he was instrumental in the formation of the United Effort Plan, which is the longest running United Order effort in modern history. President Jeffs served on the priesthood council continuously until November of 1986, when he assumed the leadership of the Church following the death of his predecessor, Leroy S. Johnson. President Jeffs shunned the publicity that often surrounded him. His followers knew him as a kind, thoughtful, and prayerful man. They will miss his humble wisdom and gentle guidance. President Jeffs is survived by a large and loving family, all of whom will miss his fatherly love and devotion. President Jeffs' funeral is scheduled for 3:00 p.m. on Thursday, September 12, 2002 at the L.S. Johnson Meetinghouse in Colorado City, Arizona. Friends may call Wednesday, September 11, 2002 from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. and again Thursday from 10:30 a.m. until time for services at the Meetinghouse. Interment will be at the Isaac Carling Memorial Park in Colorado City. Arrangements are made under the direction of Spilsbury & Beard Mortuary, St. George, UT, (435) 673-2454.
Published in Salt Lake Tribune on Sept. 10, 2002 - See more at: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/saltlaketribune/obituary.aspx?pid=482583#sthash.cPeYE9S3.dpuf
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Jeffs' funeral draws 5,080 - theHOPEorg.org
www.childbrides.org/control_spec_funeral_draws_5080.html
Sep 13, 2002 - Rulon Jeffs' funeral. Thousands of members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints make their way from the ...
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FLDS and Mormons
fldsmormons.com/
The FLDS broke away from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints around 1889. They chose not to accept the prophet of that time, Wilford Woodruff, as their leader because they were unwilling to accept that polygamy as a church practice was ended. Those who rejected the cancellation of polygamy through revelation moved away to form their own communities. The groups split off several times, and today there are a number of groups practicing polygamy, none of which are part of the original church. Today, any member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who decides to begin practicing polygamy is excommunicated. Most of the people currently in the apostate groups have never been members of the original church.
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Boyd Summers says:
March 16, 2014 at 8:35 pm The LDS church avoids talking about what Joseph Smith started having plural wives. WHY? I am an active member in the LDS church. Having poligamy is a sin and ruin many lives. I would like a respone quickly. Don’t avoid this question. Provide me information. D&C 132 confuses me.
Boyd L Summers
Gale says:
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does not avoid talking about Joseph Smith’s polygamy and how it was instituted and practiced. The history has never been hidden, but now the Church is making the information even more readily available through new “topics” articles online and a new LDS Seminary manual. The institute manuals have always contained information about polygamy. Here’s a new article under the topics section: https://www.lds.org/topics/plural-marriage-and-families-in-early-utah?lang=eng
Polygamy is only a sin when God says it is. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob practiced polygamy and have been exalted. It takes sacrifice and purity, and even then it is difficult. If you read the personal accounts at http://historyofmormonism.com, you will see that many refused to enter into the practice until they received very profound revelations on the subject. Even then, only about 20% of Latter-day Saints entered into the practice. Today, of course, any Latter-day Saint who practices polygamy is excommunicated.
When you read Doctrine and Covenants 132, visualize it as the eternal marriage covenant between one man and one wife. Polygamy never was a requirement for exaltation. Its modern practice was meant to raise up righteous seed unto God at the very beginnings of the restoration during a period of great difficulty and probably as part of the “restoration of all things.”
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Media:
Warner Bros. is currently bargaining for the rights to Jon Krakauer's controversial book, "Under the Banner of Heaven," according to a report from The Wrap on Wednesday. If negotiations are successful, Ron Howard ("The Da Vinci Code" and "Angels and Demons") will direct the film and Dustin Lance Black ("Big Love" and "Milk") will write the film's script, the story also reported. (July 20, 2011)
But the film still in development according to imdb …
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From Andrea:
Hi all, I thought I'd pass along this link to a podcast episode about Mormons struggling with the history of their faith as well as current issues such as same-sex marriage: https://overcast.fm/+DzGX9VQYw
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Sister Wives is an unscripted reality show airing on TLC. The series first aired in September 2010 and has seen six seasons so far, the last of which began airing on September 13, 2015. The series details the lives of a polygamist family living in Las Vegas, Nevada. The series is one of the network’s top shows and is likely to continue as long as the family want to be involved.
Continue reading: http://waitwith.us/sister-wives-season-7-2770/
"Sister Wives" season 7 is expected to air some time this year.
Read more at http://www.christianpost.com/news/sister-wives-season-7-spoilers-meri-browns-exit-158115/#OmGZxXgUPMj61qmL.99
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Big Love (53 episodes, 2006 - 2011, HBO)
From creators Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer comes Big Love, the story of a man, Bill Henrickson, living in Salt Lake City with his three wives, three houses, and three families.
As if normal family life isn't enough trouble, Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton, Twister, Thunderbirds) has everything in triple: three wives, three houses, three families. Bill's first and only legal wife is Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn, Word of Honor) but he also shares the bedroom with middle wife Nicki (Chloe Sevigny, Boys Don't Cry, Dogville) and youngest wife Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin, Ed, Mona Lisa Smile). Bill also has three new adjoining houses, seven kids, and a booming hardware business. His closest friend and business partner at Home Plus, Don Embry (Joel McKinnon Miller), is also a polygamist. The series kicks in as Bill receives troublesome news about his father Frank (Bruce Dern, Last Man Standing), who lives in rural Utah in a fundamentalist community lead by Bill's father-in-law, the menacing "Prophet" Roman Grant (Harry Dean Stanton, Wild at Heart, The Green Mile).
Bill's younger brother Joey (Shawn Doyle, The Eleventh Hour) was once a star athlete in the NFL, but is now getting used to living in the compound with his wife Wanda (Melora Walters, Magnolia, The Butterfly Effect). Bill's mother Lois (Grace Zabriskie, Twin Peaks, Fried Green Tomatoes) is a descendant to the original founder of the Juniper Creek compound, and is still bitter for Roman Grant's hostile takeover for the leadership. Daveigh Chase (The Ring,Lilo & Stitch) plays Roman's latest wife, the child-bride Rhonda. Rounding out the cast are Amanda Seyfried(Veronica Mars, As the World Turns) as Bill and Barb's oldest daughter Sarah, Douglas Smith (Citizen Duane) as Ben, the adoring son, and Jolean Wejbe as Tancy, the precocious 8-year-old.
The series is executive produced by creators Mark V. Olsen (Easter) and Will Scheffer (Easter), Oscar-winning actor Tom Hanks, and Gary Goetzman (Band of Brothers, The Polar Express).
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Documentary -- Prophet’s Prey
Published on Feb 5, 2015
PROPHET’S PREY, the documentary examination of Warren Jeffs and his fundamentalist sect of the Church of Mormon is shared by director Amy Berg and author Jon Krakauer, direct from the film’s 2015 Sundance Film Fest premiere. With clips from the movie, we get insight from Krakauer about his book, UNDER THE BANNER OF HEAVEN, which was inspiration for the film, and how Berg came to work with him
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Judges press Utah about polygamy ban in 'Sister Wives' case
bigstory.ap.org/.../appeals-court-hear-sister-wives-polyg...
Associated Press
Jan 21, 2016 - A three-judge panel of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver put some ... The family says its TLC reality show "Sister Wives" reveals that ... as federal appeals judges questioned a lawyer for Utah about whether the ...
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Ron Lafferty • Utah Death Row inmate
© Copyright 2016 The Salt Lake Tribune. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Condemned killer Ron Lafferty seeks halt of federal appeal to pursue state claims
Ron Lafferty • Utah Death Row inmate
By jennifer dobner The Salt Lake Tribune
Published: July 14, 2015 04:19PM
Updated: September 10, 2015 07:59PM
Courts • Lafferty was convicted of the 1984 murder of his sister-in-law and baby niece.
Attorneys for condemned killer Ron Lafferty have filed an amended petition asking a federal judge to halt an appeal of his conviction so that he can take some of his legal claims back to state court.
Among the 74-year-old Lafferty’s claims: That the state mishandled or destroyed parts of a bloodied kitchen drape which was used as evidence in the case, and that Utah’s methods of execution — the firing squad and lethal injection — violate Eight Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment.
The July 10 petition was filed in response to a June order from U.S. District Judge Dee Benson that found some of Lafferty’s grounds for appeal had not already been exhausted in the state courts. Benson’s ruling came more than a year after Lafferty initially asked the federal court to stay the case.
Lafferty is on Utah’s death row following a 1985 conviction for the murders of his sister-in-law Brenda Wright Lafferty and her 15-month-old daughter, Erica, in Utah County.
The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals later overturned the conviction and ordered a new trial after finding that the wrong standards had been used to evaluate Lafferty’s mental competency. Lafferty was convicted and sentenced to death again for the murders in 1996.
According to trial testimony, Lafferty ordered the slayings after receiving a revelation from God. His brother, Dan Lafferty, carried out the 1984 murder by slashing their victims’ throats with a 10-inch boning knife at their home in American Fork.
Dan Lafferty also was convicted of murder, but is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
Federal court records show state attorneys have not yet filed a response to Ron Lafferty’s newly amended petition. No hearing dates are set in the case and it is not clear how soon Benson might issue a ruling.
In court papers, his attorneys say Lafferty’s right to due process was violated when the state, after the 1985 trial, failed to adequately preserve the condition of a blood-stained drape from Brenda Wright Lafferty’s kitchen.
“ … portions of the drape were removed and either lost or destroyed, and it was mishandled in a way that compromised its evidentiary value,” court documents state. The filing also says the drape was for a time being stored in the office of an assistant attorney general working on the case, which compromised its integrity as evidence.
“This kind of forensic evidence is unique,” court papers say. “Any change to the evidence will fundamentally alter it and its evidentiary value is lost forever,” the document states.
Lafferty’s attorneys also claim the state’s available methods of execution will cause him “unnecessary pain, torture and lingering death,” in violation of his constitutional rights — an argument his defense team failed to raise at the time of his second conviction.
They also contend Lafferty, who selected death by firing squad as state law allowed in 1996, was “incompetent to make a choice” at the time.
The petition further raises other claims, including issues of religious bias relating to the jury and the ineffective assistance of trial and post-conviction appeal attorneys who, among other things, failed to tell the courts that Lafferty wanted to represent himself.
jdobner@sltrib.com
© Copyright 2016 The Salt Lake Tribune. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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Dan Lafferty in 2003
Convicted Murderer Says He Influenced Utah Couple to Kill Themselves and Their Children
A convicted murderer serving out a life sentence for killing two people says that he influenced Benjamin and Kristi Strack to kill their children and themselves.
Dan Lafferty, 66, and his brother Ron were convicted in the 1984 slayings of their sister-in-law, Brenda Lafferty, and her 15-month old daughter. In an interview with the Associated Press on Thursday, Dan, who believes himself to be the prophet Elijah, claimed that he and Kristi fell in love and that it was his philosophy that led to the family's deaths.
Dan and Ron were members of a radical polygamous group. Brenda was married to Allen, the youngest Lafferty brother. She was targeted by the older brothers because they believed she influenced Ron's wife to leave him after refusing to let him take on another wife. The brothers said God told them to kill Brenda and her baby girl.
Though Dan claimed responsibility for both of the deaths, Ron is currently on death row as he was convicted of killing Brenda and orchestrating the murder plot.
The gruesome tale was the subject of the 2003 book Under the Banner of Heaven, a book Dan now says Kristi Strack was obsessed with.
According to Dan, Kristi had a dream about him while reading the book 10 years ago and eventually reached out to him. The Stracks became close friends with Dan, visiting him in Utah State Prison on an almost weekly basis.
The Strack family, circa 2005
Courtesy Strack Family
"He's very fond of them," Springville police Cpl. Greg Turnbow told the Salt Lake Tribune. "He wanted his remains to go to them."
Dan claims Kristi's husband Benjamin knew Dan and Kristi were in love and didn't mind. Dan says he cut off his waist-length hair at her request and sent it to the family.
But the Stracks's relationship with Dan came to an abrupt halt in 2008, when the couple pleaded guilty to criminal charges including forgery and drug possession, effectively ending their visitation privileges.
Kristi and Dan exchanged letters for a while afterwards, but the correspondence stopped when Kristi said she didn't believe Dan was the prophet Elijah.
Dan told the AP that he hadn't spoken to the Stracks in years, but said that he believes it was his "hell-on-earth philosophy" that led to the murder-suicides.
"My insanity messes with people's lives," Lafferty said. "It's just the way it is."
He added: "I'll miss them, but I'm happy for them. I believe they're in paradise now."
Police were initially baffled when the Utah family of five was found dead last September.
The parents were found with cups of red liquid next to their bodies, while the children – Benson, 14, Emery, 12, and Zion, 11 – were discovered lying on and around the bed, covered with blankets up to their necks, with empty bottles of liquid methadone and boxes of cold and flu medication nearby.
Police concluded Tuesday that Benjamin and Kristi murdered their two youngest children and possibly killed a third with a combination of drugs including methadone.
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