Ken Driggs

KEN DRIGGS is a career criminal defense lawyer living in Atlanta, Georgia. He has published numerous articles on the legal aspects of Mormon history, on fundamentalist Mormons, and about criminal defense work. He is also the author of Evil Among Us: The Texas Mormon Missionary Murders (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2000).

The Prosecutions Begin: Defining Cohabitation in 1885

Articles/Essays – Volume 21, No. 1

The prosecution of George Reynolds in the mid-1870s and the United States Supreme Court’s 1879 affirmation of that conviction are usually viewed as the key legal events leading to mass prosecution of Mormon polygamists in…

Fundamentalist Attitudes Toward the Church: The Sermons of Leroy S. Johnson

Articles/Essays – Volume 23, No. 2

Dialogue 23.2 (Summer 1990): 39–60
Driggs shares what an early fundamentalist leader by the name of Leory S. Johnson taught about the church and polygamy.

Twentieth-Century Polygamy and Fundamentalist Mormons in Southern Utah

Articles/Essays – Volume 24, No. 4

Dialogue 24.4 (Winter 1991): 44–58
Driggs shares the story of how in between the First and Second Manifestos, polygamy was still happening in secret.

Reflecting on the Death Penalty

Articles/Essays – Volume 29, No. 2

During the winter of 1994 a man I represented was taken to a small room in Huntsville, Texas, strapped to a gurney, and his life was taken from him by strangers in the name of…

Imprisonment, Defiance, and Division: The History of Mormon Fundamentalism in the 1940s and 1950s

Articles/Essays – Volume 38, No. 1

The modern Fundamentalist Mormon community consists of a number of groups and many independent family clusters. The two largest are the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS) centered in Colorado City, Arizona,…

“A New Future Requires a New Past”

Articles/Essays – Volume 41, No. 2

I had never heard of fundamentalist Mormons until seeing a 60 Minutes segment about them in the late 1980s. During a western vacation, I visited Colorado City, Arizona, on January 2, 1988, and talked my way into some friendships which continue to this day. FLDS Prophet Warren Jeffs, his father Rulon Jeffs, former Colorado City mayor Dan Barlow, the late Owen Allred, and his successor LeMoine Jenson of the Apostolic United Brethhren (AUB) were among my acquaintances. I later earned a graduate degree in legal history, and my thesis concerned an important event in their experience. I have continued to study, visit, and write about the fundamentalist Mormon universe since then.