It's taken Utah more than 3 years to bring a BLM gunman to trial for shooting a driver in broad daylight

Let's pick up the pace, huh?

On June 19, 2020, software engineer Ken Dudley was on his way to the Home Depot in Provo, Utah. As he drove through the center of town, he encountered what was a familiar sight around that time period: A mob of Black Lives Matter protestors had formed a wall and shut down the road.

Dudley slowed his vehicle when approaching the mob. Although he had a pistol in his car, he did not draw it. As he kept inching forward, they ran in front of his car to stop him. When the mob began to kick and bang on the vehicle, he accelerated slightly but injured no one. That’s when one of the “protestors” pulled a gun and fired.

The gunman was Jesse Taggart, who had travelled to Provo from Salt Lake City. Taggart was a “known instigator” who had made appearances at several BLM protests in the preceding months, including an earlier violent riot in Salt Lake City. Taggart fired one round through Dudley’s window, hitting Dudley in the arm. Glass from the windshield cut Dudley’s eye and torso. As Dudley stepped on the gas to escape, Taggart fired a second shot at him. Another BLM gunman, Bradley Glenn Walters, pulled out his own pistol and chased after the vehicle.

Remarkably, the BLM armed roadblock did not disband after it had drawn blood. They roamed around for some time afterwards. Taggart used his gun to break the window of another car that tried to maneuver through an intersection blocked by the “protestors.” Taggart eventually drove off with an accomplice, escaping police at the scene. Both men were identified and arrested after the fact.

Although the story made headlines nationwide when it first broke, there has been little attention paid to it since the actual shooting. In 2021, a story came out about Taggart finally being ordered to stand trial by a judge. In 2022 another was written by a local news station about Taggart’s lawyer claiming during a hearing that police acted with bias against his client.

Missing from the news was that, in early 2022, Walters was allowed to plead out to a Class B Misdemeanor, Disorderly Conduct, for pulling his gun and chasing the victim after the victim had been wounded. He was given a 6 month suspended sentence (no jailtime) and a fine of $680.

Although the charges against Taggart apparently still stand, the last hearing on the case was several months ago. It’s not clear exactly what’s going or when trial will begin, if ever.

Something’s got to give here, guys. This is ridiculous. These people were operating an armed roadblock in a nice sleepy town in a Deep Red state. Some of them travelled from neighboring cities to do this. None of this behavior should be acceptable, and yet it very clearly is today.

Everyone is entitled to a fair trial, but this goes above and beyond any requirement for fairness. This guy shot someone in the middle of a crowded street in broad daylight. It should not take more than 3 years for his trial to begin. If courts are overloaded, create special courts to handle cases like this. If prosecutors are overworked, hire special prosecutors. If it’s tough to find an unbiased jury, move the trial to another part of the state. If important legal issues need to be resolved before trial can begin, fast track these cases to the state supreme court. There’s nothing more important that they could be handling. This needs to be a priority for every Red state.

The system in place right now, where leftists basically run out the clock until the public loses interest and prosecutors are unable or unwilling to deal with these troublesome political violence cases (with the defense lawyers funded by who knows who) is not sustainable, at least for conservatives. With so much intervening time between the incident and the trial, evidence is destroyed, critical witnesses forget or disappear, and leftists have the chance to create a new false narrative that would likely have been shot down immediately if the trial was held within a reasonable period.

Prosecutors should not offer and judges should not accept generous plea agreements in cases like this. In fact, it’s absurd that other members of the mob weren’t charged with something. They were preventing the victim from escaping the armed men in their midst. If the law creates some ambiguity as to whether or not this behavior is legal, it’s time to change the law. These people need to suffer serious legal consequences for their behavior or it will only escalate further.

In the Utah state legislature, Republicans control the House by a margin of 59–16 and the Senate by 23–6. Liberal activists should not be getting away with operating armed checkpoints in this state, much less shooting people at them. These aren’t easy reforms to make. In fact, they’re very complicated. That’s why the effort needs to be undertaken in a time of relative stability: now. Things can get worse very quickly, and if that happens you’re not going to be able to put a response together on the fly.

Over the last few years a lot has been made of the impromptu citizen’s militia that showed up after the shooting. They aren’t bad guys or anything, but their impact on the situation seems pretty minimal compared to the effort and attention expended.

It was police who actually captured the shooter and his accomplices. If shooter ends up seeing any consequences for his crime, it will because of local and state officials did their jobs. Republicans need state and local officials to do their jobs much more than they need another militia. One of the many well-funded professional conservative outfits out there really needs to be keeping tabs on these cases. I should not be the one writing this article. I only lived in Utah for about a year a decade ago.

Russian Interior Minister Pyotr Stolypin’s experience in ending the huge wave of political violence that followed the 1905 Revolution could offer some insight on how to solve this problem. Worth looking into.