Lorenzo Snow's Appellate Court Victory BY KEN DRIGGS
Lorenzo Snow. USHS collections. I N FEBRUARY i887 T H E U.S. SUPREME C O U R T ORDERED the release from prison of seventy-three-year-old polygamist and M o r m o n apostle Lorenzo Snow. In o n e of the few appellate court victories won by the Mormons, the court rejected the prosecutorial theoty of segregation which could have allowed prosecutors to rack u p life sentences on polygamists for the misdemeanor crime of unlawful cohabitation. The victoty brought a shift of M o r m o n defense strategy from o n e of flight on the underground to what amounted to a policy of civil disobedience, hoping to fill up federal prisons with faithful M o r m o n husbands and win over public sympathy. The legal landscape was bleak f3r the Church ofjesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1886. T h e next four years would be even bleaker. The national uproar over polygamy ctnd the Utah theocracy had been mobilized into an effective federal prosecutorial mechanism. The third of four anti-Mormon laws passed by congress, the E d m u n d s Act of 1882, disqualified Mormons from seiving on juries, effectively denied them the vote, provided for the seizure of all church properties over $50,000, reenacted the felony crime of polygamy, and added the new misdemeanor offense of unlawful cohabitation. M o r m o n lawyers began a series of largely futile appellate protests that o n e by one were denied by the U.S. Supreme C o u r t
Mr. Driggs is completing a master of laws degree at the University of Wisconsin.
