For inciting rioters to vandalize a printing press of a news paper that exposed his polygamous marriage to an 14 year old girl, which ultimately led to his 3 witnesses denouncing the faith.

Why was John the baptist in jail before he was killed. Why where half of the apostles in jail before they were murdered. why was Jesus arrested before he was killed. Those that bear witness of the divinity of Christ are almost always subject to false accusations and then jailed and murdered.

By the beginning of June 1844 (the month that Joseph Smith Jr. was murdered), the “anti-Mormon” sentiment that had followed the Latter-day Saints since the first days of the Restoration had come to a boil. A handful of former members of the Church that had apostatized over one reason or another (most due to their disagreement with some action by Joseph Smith Jr.) were now attacking him quite vehemently and, under the direction of Joseph’s former counselor William Law, set up a new Church (which they called “the True Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints”) and began publishing an “anti-Mormon” newspaper known as the *Nauvoo Expositor.* The *Nauvoo Expositor* laid many claims to Joseph Smith’s charge, mostly dealing with Smith’s supposed desire to unite Church and state and his private practice of plural marriage, a principle that Joseph had been *very* reluctant to practice (having known about it for five years before finally taking his first plural wife) and even more reluctant to teach publicly (which didn’t happen for another seven years, or only a year or so before this incident). Some Church members still didn’t know about the practice, and still others (such as Law) quite obviously didn’t understand it. Thus, when the *Nauvoo Expositor* appeared and charged Smith with being a “fallen prophet” (among other things), it caused quite a bit of stir in the community—so much, in fact, that the Nauvoo City Council met to decide what to do about it. The minutes of the Council meeting are freely available, but the short version is that they deliberated for five hours, couldn’t come to a conclusion, and broke for the night; they met again the next day, deliberated for another five hours, *still* couldn’t come to a conclusion, and broke for the night; then finally on the third day, after four more hours of deliberation (for a total of fourteen), they finally determined that the *Expositor* was a “public nuisance” and must be destroyed for the good of city (ostensibly to prevent violence, to which the Saints had oft been subjected in the past). The Council assigned Mayor Joseph Smith Jr. (who had been elected to the position after the departure of former Mayor John C. Bennett) to carry out the destruction of the press—an action which, to modern minds, seems to blatantly contradict the Constitutional “freedom of the press” but which was viewed as very much legal, at the time. (There are many discussions of why available; in the interest of space, I will omit these.) Following the destruction of the *Nauvoo Expositor,* Smith was charged on several counts and, despite an initial attempt to flee across the Mississippi River into Iowa, returned to Nauvoo and allowed himself to be taken into custody. He was placed in Carthage Jail, to await trial, but his statements preceding said incarceration make it abundantly clear that he knew what was coming: say what you will about his last moments, but Joseph never expected to make it out alive. HTH!