Richard Wootton

Richard Wootton is a practicing Mormon psychologist whose testimony in Ron Lafferty’s trial placed Lafferty’s extraordinary religious claims in the context of beliefs held within religious communities. Rather than treating strangeness alone as proof of mental illness, Wootton asked the court to consider how culture shapes what people accept as spiritually possible.

Identity and Role

Wootton was a psychologist from Utah County, a practicing member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and an alumnus of Brigham Young University. He testified for the prosecution as the trial examined whether Ron Lafferty’s beliefs indicated mental illness. His own religious affiliation made his testimony especially relevant to the dispute over where the interpretation of religious experience ends and a psychiatric judgment begins.

The Defense’s Example

Defense attorney Mike Esplin questioned Wootton about Lafferty’s claim that Moroni was a homosexual traveler who entered people through the anus, and that the angel’s likeness appeared on modern LDS temples because Moroni had struck a bargain with Brigham Young after Joseph Smith’s death. In Lafferty’s account, Moroni had agreed to make Brigham the next church leader in return for a golden statue atop a temple spire.

Wootton agreed that the claim was bizarre. He rejected, however, the inference that its strangeness made it uniquely pathological: religious ideas accepted within one culture can appear extreme or irrational to people outside it. As an example, he noted that outsiders might regard Joseph Smith’s visions and other supernatural experiences as delusional.

Religious Belief and Mental Illness

Wootton told the court that Lafferty’s statements about spirits and revelations were not necessarily as far beyond ordinary Mormon belief as they might first appear. Talk of spirits on the other side of the veil, he explained, was familiar within Mormon religious life. That comparison did not make Lafferty’s particular claims ordinary; it showed why their religious character and cultural setting mattered when assessing them.

He acknowledged that Lafferty took religious ideas to an extreme, but stressed that other people also hold extreme religious or nonreligious ideas without committing crimes. In Wootton’s account, extremity alone could not explain criminal conduct. His testimony therefore supplied the jury with a distinction between unusual belief, religious context, and criminal behavior, without claiming that Lafferty’s specific beliefs were typical or that their content proved mental illness.