A polygamist who has five wives and 30 children and claims to be an "original Mormon" was today jailed for five years.
Tom Green, a 52-year-old former Mormon missionary, was jailed in Provo, Utah, three months after being found guilty of four counts of bigamy and one of fraudulently claiming welfare payments.
Green had become America's best-known polygamist, going on talk shows including Jerry Springer to claim he was following the original beliefs of the Mormon religion.
He had claimed his conviction was "persecution" of his religious beliefs but today judge Guy Burningham sentenced him to five years in jail for each count, to run concurrently, and ordered him to pay back £54,060 he had claimed in welfare.
The father-of-30, one of whom was born earlier this month, is due to appeal against the order to pay back the cash but his defence lawyer gave no indication that he would attempt to overturn the verdict.
And he still faces another trial, on charges of raping his 13-year-old wife Linda Kunz when he married her in 1986, which could end in another term. She is now pregnant with her seventh child by Green and he has asked a court to dismiss the charges.
Green had claimed throughout his week-long trial in May that he was following the true beliefs of the Mormon church's founder, Brigham Young, who practised and encouraged bigamy when he established the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints in Utah in the 1840s.
But the church outlawed polygamy 50 years later to allow Utah to become a state and the practice was driven underground, with an estimated 30,000 polygamists in the state and its neighbours today.
Green himself was automatically excommunicated from the church by marrying twice and now has five wives, all of whom he married when they were teenagers.
He claimed he became a bigamist and then a polygamist after reading the history of the Mormon church he was then a member of.
"Finding out that plural marriage existed, that blew me away," he said.
And he said he felt he was being made a martyr in the same way as the church's founders by prosecutors, who filed charges long after he talked openly of his lifestyle on television.
"I thought, how could these men be prophets of God and be criminals and lawbreakers?" Green said.