Two Canadians, including man who has 25 wives and 146 kids, convicted of polygamy

Winston Blackmore and James Oler were found guilty by British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Sheri Ann Donegan who said the evidence was clear that Blackmore was married to 25 women at the same time and that Oler was married to five women in the tiny community of Bountiful.

Blackmore, 60, never denied having the wives as part of his religious beliefs that call for “celestial” marriages. His lawyer Blair Suffredine has already said Blackmore would challenge the constitutionality of Canada’s polygamy laws if his client was found guilty.

​Blackmore and Oler were prosecuted as part of an investigation first launched in the early 1990s by the provincial government.

Under Canadian law, the maximum penalty they will each face is five year in prison. The two will be sentenced at future hearings.

Blackmore and Oler are members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a breakaway Mormon sect that believes in plural marriage. The group’s main base is in a small community on the Utah-Arizona border in the United States.

The mainstream Mormon church renounced polygamy in the late 19th century.