Stewart Young currently serves as the Criminal Deputy Attorney General at the Office of the Attorney General in the State of Utah (OAG). He is part of the OAG’s Executive Team and leads the OAG Criminal Department (which includes more than 130 prosecutors, agents, support staff, and professional staff). The Criminal Department consists of five Divisions: Justice Division, Investigations Division, Mortgage and Financial Fraud Division (White-Collar), Medicaid Control Fraud Division, and the Children’s Justice Centers Program. As the Criminal Chief, Stew is the AG-designated representative on:
• Utah Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice (CCJJ);
• Utah POST Council;
• Utah Sentencing Commission;
• Statewide Association of Prosecutors (SWAP);
• Governor’s Criminal Justice Task Force.
Stew previously served for almost thirteen years as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Financial Crimes Section, as well as both the District’s Criminal Tax Coordinator and TIGTA Coordinator at the U.S. Attorney’s Office (USAO) of the District of Utah. For more than three months in 2024, he was detailed to the Counterterrorism Section, National Security Division, as the DOJ Judicial Attaché stationed in Amman, Jordan, working on international counterterrorism prosecutions with the U.S. military and more than two dozen foreign partners. For three years, he was detailed to the Department of Justice as a Trial Attorney for Joint Task Force Vulcan, which was tasked with eliminating the MS-13 international gang in the United States and abroad. He previously served as the Senior Litigation Counsel, Training Officer, Lead Corporate Fraud Attorney, and in the following USAO sections: Violent Crimes, OCDETF, Public Corruption, and White Collar/Economic Fraud. He joined the Utah USAO in 2012, after serving as a tenure-track law professor at the University of Wyoming College of Law. Previously, for four years he served as an AUSA through the Attorney General’s Honors Program in the Southern District of California (San Diego).
After graduating from law school, Stew served successive federal judicial clerkships on the Ninth Circuit (for Judge Jay Bybee in Las Vegas) and on the District of Utah (for Judge Paul Cassell). Stew is a graduate of Stanford Law School, with a master’s degree from Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan, and an undergraduate degree from Princeton University.
Stew has extensive trial and appellate experience in the federal system, having tried more than two dozen jury trials to verdict, briefed more than a score of appeals in the Ninth and Tenth Circuits, and argued more than half-dozen times in both circuits. While at the University of Wyoming, Stew ran the Prosecution Assistance Program, which resulted in his 3L students briefing and arguing more than twenty Wyoming Supreme Court appeals by his students (and several by him personally).
Stew has published in numerous law reviews and periodicals, on subjects ranging from firearms trafficking, cybercrime, and gang crime. He has written four chapters for the DOJ’s A Prosecutor’s Reference Guide for Trial Problems and four chapters for DOJ’s Federal Narcotics Prosecutions: Basic Principles of Domestic Narcotics Cases. He regularly trains federal prosecutors at the National Advocacy Center in South Carolina, along with lecturing at various CLEs around the state and throughout the country. He has trained law enforcement and academics at the National Gang Crime Research Center, the Utah Narcotics Officers’ Association, the Utah Gang Investigators’ Association, the Salt Lake Area Gang Project, and numerous federal and state/local agencies around the state, throughout the country, and even internationally.
Stew has received numerous honors and awards for his prosecutorial work, including such national honors as the EOUSA Director’s Award, the DEA Administrators’ Award, the National Association of Former U.S. Attorneys’ (NAFUSA) Exceptional Service Award (provided to ten AUSAs in the country), the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association (FLEOA) Group Achievement Award, the Secretary of Defense Medal for the Global War on Terror, the Joint Civilian Service Achievement Medal, the Lex Falcon Global Award (“Inspiring Government Legal Official”), and several Frederick Thrasher Awards (for “Superior Accomplishment in Gang Prosecution”) from the National Gang Crime Research Center. He has received numerous commendations and citations in Utah from the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office, the Utah Narcotics Officers’ Association, the Utah Gang Investigators’ Association, the Salt Lake Area Metro Gang Unit, along with several awards from the Utah USAO, the FBI, the Department of Defense, and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute (ALI).