Joseph Smith Summoned to Court Over 200 Times on Trumped-Up Charges — and Never Once Convicted (1826–1844)

Throughout his life as prophet of the restored Church, Joseph Smith was hauled before the courts again and again. As President Boyd K. Packer recounted in his October 2008 general conference address "The Test": "During his life, Joseph Smith was summoned to court over 200 times on all kinds of trumped-up charges. He was never convicted."

Those appearances spanned the whole span of his ministry — from the earliest persecutions in New York and Pennsylvania, through the Missouri persecutions and the charges surrounding Liberty Jail, to the final months in Nauvoo when state and federal warrants were repeatedly sought to drag him back to Missouri. Charges ranged from disorderly preaching to fraud, trespass, and finally treason — yet across more than two hundred court appearances on trumped-up charges, no court ever convicted him of any crime. His acquittals stand among the most striking evidences of divine preservation in the Prophet's ministry: again and again, hostile judges and persecuting officers could not make a case against him stick, even as mobs and militia carried out extrajudicial violence against him and his people.

Fuller account of this event (the complete account as preserved in President Boyd K. Packer, "The Test," General Conference, October 2008):

During his life, Joseph Smith was summoned to court over 200 times on all kinds of trumped-up charges. He was never convicted.