On the eve of early voting, the two candidates in the race for Tulsa County district attorney painted each other as green and outdated.
“My opponent has been out of law school for five years, and she has never done a jury trial. She has never been a prosecutor, and before this election, she’d never even been a criminal defense attorney,” District Attorney Steve Kunzweiler said about his opponent, Colleen McCarty.
The candidates appeared at a special forum hosted by the Rotary Club of Tulsa Wednesday.
Kunzweiler has been Tulsa County’s DA since 2015. He’s running on his 37 years of experience as a criminal prosecutor.
“Her experience in criminal law has been limited to an internship in which she was a student,” he said.
McCarty is coming off a stint as the executive director of Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, an organization she founded in 2022.
She wants to take the DA’s office in a new direction after more than a decade under Kunzweiler, who she said hasn’t lived up to expectations.
“We have a complete failure of leadership happening right now, and it also manages the civil division of the district attorney’s office where we have seen $128,700,000 in civil verdicts on things like jail deaths and wrongful convictions in his tenure,” McCarty said.
Both candidates shared different views on social justice, what a DA’s workload and priorities should be and prosecutorial discretion. But with each answer, they each made it clear that the choice will be between something new, as McCarty put it, or someone experienced, as said by Kunzweiler.
McCarty repeatedly attacked Kunzweiler’s track record, describing the current DA’s office as a toxic work environment while also questioning his ethics.
“We hear over and over again from the prosecutors who continue to leave that office that it’s a toxic work environment,” McCarty said. “You cannot deliver public safety results for the people of this county in a toxic work environment, where you don’t trust the person that’s working next to you.”
After refuting some of her claims, Kunzweiler highlighted the disparity in terms of experience.
“The ability to navigate the inner workings of the case, the burdens of proof, the way the evidence code is applied — these are the experiences that are necessary to run the Tulsa County District Attorney’s Office, and that’s the experience that my opponent simply does not have,” he said.
Early voting runs Thursday and Friday from 8 a.m to 6 p.m. and Saturday from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Election Day is Tuesday with polls open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Check out the Tulsa Flyer’s voter guide to prepare for the polls.
Ismael Lele is a Report for America corps member and writes about business in Tulsa for The Oklahoma Eagle. Your donation to match our Report for America grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting this link.
