Agreement reached on polygamist baby

SAN ANGELO, Texas, Nov. 26 (UPI) -- Lawyers for Texas child welfare officials and a 17-year-old mother from a polygamist sect reached an agreement Tuesday on revealing the location of her baby.

The details of the agreement were sealed, the San Angelo Standard Times reported. But the settlement apparently saves the teenager from being held in contempt of court.

Judge Barbara Walther, who was reversed after she upheld the right of Texas Child Protective Services to seize children from a fundamentalist Mormon compound, had ordered the girl to produce the infant. She showed up in court Tuesday but without the child and said the baby was out of state and she was not sure where.

CPS officials say that the girl was married at the age of 14 to an older member of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints -- a marriage that would have been illegal. The infant was born not long after the children were returned to the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Texas.

Willie Jessop, a lawyer for the sect, said that officials are to blame for the girl's stubbornness, because she fears that both she and her child will be put in foster care.