Polygamy

The criminal offense, in a jurisdiction that does not legally recognize marriage to more than one spouse at a time, of entering into or maintaining an additional marriage or marriage-like union while already married, prosecuted in the United States under a state's bigamy or polygamy statute, most often in connection with a religious or communal practice rather than an ordinary undisclosed second marriage. Prosecutions have centered most visibly on fundamentalist Mormon communities that practice plural marriage in doctrinal departure from the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which formally renounced polygamy in 1890, including the prosecution of Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints leader Warren Jeffs, whose 2011 Texas conviction for sexual assault of a child arose from marriages he arranged between adult men and underage girls within a polygamous community structure. The United States Supreme Court upheld the criminalization of polygamy against a religious-freedom challenge in its 1878 decision in Reynolds v. United States, a precedent that has not been overturned.