Thin Blue Line: El Dorado County Jail

Sunday 16 December 2012

El Dorado County Jail

Raymond Merril Jessop has been the only man on trial the past two weeks in Schleicher County.Even the eyeball-torturing lighting in the 51st Judicial District Courtroom couldn’t trick anyone into seeing 11 other shadows cast behind his as he sat quietly at the defense table. Jessop is the first to be tried among 12 members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints facing charges in the county.He kept his tanned, attractive face nearly free of expression and didn’t twitch when fingers pointed at him over nine grueling days in the makeshift courtroom where he was on trial, charged with sexually assaulting a 16-year-old in November 2004 at the Yearning for Zion Ranch near Eldorado.Then Thursday evening, Jessop, 38, walked past a group of men in the gallery who appeared to be members of his polygamist sect.Things were different now. Anyone could see that.He didn’t walk the same — not because of the new burden of a jury’s guilty verdict branding him a sex offender, but because of how the cuffs binding his hands behind him contorted his posture.