Steve Kunzweiler situates his career within a blue-collar Catholic upbringing shaped by Depression-era parents who prioritized church and education. His mother worked as a waitress, did not finish high school, and later earned her GED after her sons left home. His father, raised in southwest Minnesota, finished high school, completed a year of trade school, and became a draftsman before moving, meeting, and marrying Steve’s mother. The family lived in O’Fallon, Missouri about 35 miles west of St. Louis. He is the third of four brothers. The eldest, Ron, first joined the Peace Corps in Morocco and later became a Baptist preacher; Tim entered the Air Force, flew C-130s and helicopters, and retired from the service; and Ted became a manufacturing plant supervisor. Steve describes their lives collectively as “really blessed.”
At the monthly First Friday Discussion Group, Kunzweiler said he always imagined he would be a lawyer. Before attending law school he earned an undergraduate degree in agriculture journalism from the University of Missouri, learning about legal life indirectly through television shows like The Paper Chase and Law & Order.
He met his wife, Christine, on a blind high school date when he was a senior and she a junior; they dated for about a year and a half. Although Christine “promptly dumped” him when they went to college, they ultimately married and have been together 37 years, with three daughters now aged 35, 34, and 25.
Kunzweiler’s pivotal professional epiphany arrived in June, 1987 during an internship for the Commonwealth Attorney’s Office in Hampton, Virginia. On his first day, he was assigned a file to review at home: a possible homicide case against Chester Eugene Stark. The police reports were compelling and included a photo of a deceased man, shot and lying on the ground and, in that moment, he understood that prosecution was his calling. He frames this as his “unique seed” moment, akin to his brother Ron’s calling in Morocco to preach and Tim’s to become an Air Force pilot.
The Philosophy of a Prosecutor as Minister of Justice
Kunzweiler’s philosophy is anchored in a religiously formed moral clarity — “Right is right and wrong is wrong. Black is black and white is white.”—and in a professional identity he describes as “minister of justice,” a term he notes appears in ethics rules and Supreme Court case law. For him, prosecution is not about winning or losing; it is about ensuring the court has the information to make the right decision and correct wrongs, including removing the criminal label when evidence shows someone is not guilty. He places priorities as “God first, and then it’s going to be my family. And then it’s going to be my job,” a hierarchy he says has been set since childhood. He also views his vocation as one way to live out the call to “preach the gospel” through subtle, disciplined service.
A critical mentor, Nowata County Judge James Sontag, shaped his understanding through Socratic questions—about the purposes of direct and cross-examination—and a more expansive definition of prosecutorial duty: the prosecutor’s role is “to teach people the morals they either never learned or they forgot.”
Kunzweiler internalized this as a duty to help people discern right from wrong, especially in a system where prosecutors make daily decisions that profoundly affect lives while seeking truth and justice. He asserts that lawyers have a sacred obligation to shepherd the rule of law akin to ministers shepherding the law of God. He criticizes those who enter law for money or position, saying those lawyers have done a “great disservice” to the citizens they are supposed to serve. He instructs his attorneys to ensure the people they deal with understand the law better than they did, so the community grows stronger beyond their tenure.
The Path to District Attorney: Rejection, Providence, and High-Profile Cases
After law school, Kunzweiler’s first role was assistant district attorney for Larry Stuart in Pawhuska, handling child support enforcement across four counties. A full-time assistant role in Nowata County opened, enabling him to move into criminal prosecution. He later served under DA Rick Esser, becoming first assistant in Washington County from 1994 to 2002. Kunzweiler’s adherence to the “minister of justice” ethic inspired him to join Tim Harris’s office in 2002. He stayed until Harris retired in 2014, after which Kunzweiler ran and was elected District Attorney. He calls the DA position “the best job on the planet.”
Those first four years, he says, were “the craziest four-year ride” imaginable: his office prosecuted former officer Shannon Kepler for killing his daughter’s boyfriend; soon after, a quadruple homicide at 61st and Peoria left four women shot in the head; then, in July of that year, the Bever brothers “slaughtered their family” in Broken Arrow; and the following year, Officer Betty Shelby shot Terence Crutcher, a nationally televised case that unfolded amid the “Ferguson on fire” climate. He concludes that without the path forged by earlier rejections and mentorship, he would not have been ready for such cases.
Kunzweiler said, “Every day I get up, it’s just like, All right, what am I going to do today?”
Addressing Media Narratives
Kunzweiler critiques what he calls advocacy journalism that targets Tulsa County figures, arguing national outlets (The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times) pursue narratives to make the South look bad. The New York Times contacted him regarding the Survivors Act; he expected a “hatchet job” but engaged anyway, gave a long interview, and insisted the photo shoot occur at his library rather than his office. He describes photographers seeking an unflattering pose or cluttered background to depict a “hillbilly southern prosecutor,” and notes they tried to position his hands to obscure his wedding ring until he refused. Spotting his fisherman’s bracelet, they pivoted to include both ring and bracelet—details he believes they’ll use to cast him as a religious fanatic. He says he embraces visibly showing his faith and marriage. He anticipates attack ads and says a lesson from the Trump era is “outspoken honesty.”
Kunzweiler invites open, respectful debates grounded in facts, framing the public as the “jury” to whom he must present facts rather than mere arguments. He adds that media could play a constructive role by covering appellate outcomes, reversals, and judges’ rulings to illuminate how justice works.
A Broader Critique of the Legal and Political Systems
From a systems perspective, Kunzweiler argues that society flourishes through adherence to the rule of law. Lawyers, he says, are shepherds and bear a sacred duty akin to ministers in religious life. He is critical of the legal profession’s failures, which he believes have fueled polarization by abandoning problem-solving discourse for entrenched battle lines.
He details his office structure and workload: a total staff of 120, including 55 attorneys; roughly 25 to 30 handle criminal casework (misdemeanors and felonies), with others in juvenile, appeals, and civil work. The office’s felony peak was 7,000 cases; last year it handled around 4,400 felonies and a similar number of misdemeanors. He attributes caseload declines partly to reduced law enforcement, the legalization of marijuana, and policy shifts such as raising the misdemeanor theft threshold from $500 to $1,000 (since adjusted back to what he calls a “better spot”). He asserts that, outside violent crimes, “you have to work your way into prison,” countering activist narratives that “everyone goes to prison.”
He describes jurisdictional complexity post-McGirt as “very difficult,” emphasizing parallel sovereigns: the federal government and the State of Oklahoma may each prosecute without double jeopardy, and tribal courts add to make a “three layered cake” in some cases. He supports state sovereignty while encouraging tribes to prosecute under tribal laws without depriving the state of its equal opportunity. As an example of local action, he notes the “Chiefs” superfan who robbed banks nationally, including one in Bixby, received a 17-year federal sentence, which he believed was too mild of a sentence. He prosecuted him in state court and obtained an additional 30 year sentence.
Shifting to governance, he criticizes legislatures “across the whole country” for losing the representative ethos. He argues lawmakers often accept bills from lobbyists or bureaucrats without rigorous vetting, and that the breadth of roughly 70 code titles makes it unrealistic for anyone to know everything. He urges intellectual humility, saying, “Blessed is the man who knows what he doesn’t know.”
His deliberative process mindset is slow down, seek help, bring in multiple thinkers, and return to basic problem-solving. He encourages young representatives entering the legislature to hear from both bill proponents and opponents and host structured debates in their offices.
Regarding the judiciary, he lauds judges who are unafraid of appeals and laments a broader avoidance culture in which fear of error leads to “dumbing down” decisions.
He frames failure as a choice among three trajectories—backward (never improves), neutral (stagnant), or forward (learns and grows)—and warns that too many people fail backward or neutral yet still ascend to influential roles. He maintains that when judges make “really bad rulings,” his office appeals and wins reversals, and he proposes greater public visibility into those outcomes to enhance understanding and accountability.
Throughout, his internal motto for the office, attributed to Tim Harris, is “find truth, seek justice,” and he underscores that he would not deserve to remain DA if he were “crappy with victims” or fiscally mismanaged the office.
For more information click here for his office site and click here for his campaign site.
. The election primary is June 16th and the general election is November 3, 2026.
About the author: David Arnett’s beginning in print journalism was not planned in 1985 but covered by Rebecca Martin writing for the Columbia Journalism Review in 1987. After 11 years in print, he established TulsaToday online in 1996 and Straight Up on Substack in 2022 providing email subscriptions to the latest local news and opinion.
Thank you for reading. Your comments are welcome below and/or by email.
He seems to be a very competent person from what I gleaned from the article. Thanks for the article. I wish we had someone like that in Pottawatomie County.
He gives out plea deal to r*pists when their victims want prosecution. He fights to put exonerated men back in prison, wasting our tax dollars in appealing decisions. He still backs Tim Harris in what happened in the Michelle Murphy case. Steve Kunzweiler is an awful man who lies to the media. We've seen him lie about April Wilkens, saying her abuser took out protective orders against her when the local news called him out on it. He spends THOUSANDS of dollars hiring crackpot psychologists on our dime to keep grandmothers locked up. He is not who I will be voting for. Tulsa should choose Colleen McCarty.