Restoring Trust
Delivering Justice

The DA decides which criminal cases get filed, which get declined, and how open cases are resolved. The office reviewed roughly 23,000 referrals in 2024. It also serves as legal counsel to Salt Lake County government. This is not a legislative job. There are no bills to introduce and no floor votes to cast. It is an executive job running a professional office of more than 100 prosecutors, and the work is management, judgment, and follow-through.

Almost everything, and no one talks about it. Salt Lake County budgets $37.1 million for indigent defense in 2026 and staffs that division with a single full time employee. The work is contracted out to private firms. That cost moves with how many cases get charged and how long they stay open, and both are decisions the prosecutor makes. The county's own budget groups prosecution and indigent defense together as public safety, because when a case is run inefficiently the taxpayer pays twice. A prosecutor who ignores the defense side of the ledger is only managing half the system. I will manage all of it.

I do not know, and neither does anyone else. That is the problem. The legislative audit found admission criteria were undefined, participants were not tracked, and staff in the District Attorney's Office blocked auditor access for months and never delivered the data they agreed to provide. Diversion that works is far cheaper than prosecution, and for the right defendant it protects public safety better than a jail bed does. Diversion that does not work is money burned. Right now nobody can tell the difference. I will define who qualifies, track what happens, and publish the results.

Because charging decisions are not partisan decisions. Vote for the job, not the label. Nothing on my agenda depends on a party platform. Written filing standards, documented plea agreements, published performance metrics, and open books for auditors are administrative commitments, and every one of them comes from a unanimous, bipartisan legislative audit. National politics does not touch a single thing I plan to do in this office.

Because I saw a problem and I know how to fix it. I did not go looking for this race. I watched the news coverage and read the December 2025 legislative audits of the office where I used to work, and I recognized the problems. I know this office from the inside. I know what it should look like. I was not willing to accept that nothing could be done.

I prosecuted cases in this office as a Salt Lake County Deputy District Attorney from 2017 to 2021. I have served as a public defender, so I have seen the system from the other side of the table. I clerked in federal court and served at the Department of Justice. I served as an Army Infantry officer. I completed two combat deployments to Iraq. Today I am Corporate Counsel and Director of Cybersecurity at Woodbury Corporation, where I manage risk, budgets, and people. Trial work and management are different skills. Leadership is different from management. This job requires all three.

Report 2025-31, released in December 2025 by the Office of the Legislative Auditor General, found the office had no formal written filing policies until a screening handbook was produced during the audit itself in March 2025, and that most staff were unaware of any earlier version. In a random sample of 50 felony declinations, about 48 percent lacked detailed reasoning for why the case was declined. Auditors found no quantitative metrics in use to evaluate the office's effectiveness. The full report is public. Read it.

Written filing policies, so every prosecutor knows which cases get charged and why. Written plea guidelines that are enforced so similarly situated defendants are treated in similar fashion. Every declination gets a documented reason. Expand the public declinations dashboard, so anyone can see what's being done in their name. Auditors get access to every meeting, file, and data set they ask for, without exception. A clock on charging decisions so every case gets filed or declined inside a fixed window or a written explanation as to why the charging decision needs more time. None of this requires the Legislature, a tax increase, or a court ruling. All of it sits inside the DA's own authority. The state already recommended it. I will implement it.

I am effective on crime, and I think that framing is how this county got stuck. A charge filed without evidence to support it is not toughness. It is a wasted case and a victim who gets told later that it fell apart. A case declined without a documented reason is not mercy. It is a decision nobody can review. Auditors found prosecutors here carrying over 400 general felony cases at a time, more than double the load in some other Utah counties. Overloaded prosecutors do not produce tough outcomes. They produce inconsistent ones.

The same way I would handle any other case, under a written standard set in advance and applied the same way every time. I have worked alongside law enforcement as a prosecutor and against the state as a defense attorney. Both experiences taught me the same thing: the credibility of an outcome depends on whether the process was decided before anyone knew who the defendant was. I will publish the protocol for officer-involved cases. Neither officers nor families should have to guess how the decision gets made.

Ballots mail to Salt Lake County voters in mid October, and Election Day is November 3, 2026. Confirm your registration and your mailing address with the Salt Lake County Clerk. If you want to do more, you can volunteer, contribute, request a yard sign, or take three minutes to send this page to someone who has never thought about the DA race. County contribution limits apply and all filings are public.