Mark Shurtleff: Attorney general tackles Utah's toughest issues

Since taking the job, Shurtleff has made waves and enemies. He issued an opinion on the anti-gay marriage amendment to the Utah Constitution, saying it went beyond defining marriage as a man and woman; he contended that it denied basic rights for gay couples and therefore was potentially unconstitutional. To some, that made him anti-traditional family.

He waded into the gun fray at the University of Utah, announcing that the school's ban on guns, even by those with a concealed weapons permit, would be found unconstitutional.

The university sued him twice before capitulating.

"I was called a gun nut," he says. "But it's the law."

On the other hand, after he told the small town of Virgin that it was illegal to pass a law that made it unlawful not to carry a gun, he received angry e-mails calling him anti-American, one from a man who signed it, "One man and many bullets."

He also took up the cause of shield laws, which protect news media being forced to reveal confidential sources. He was recruited to lead a group of state attorneys general to file a friend-of-the-court brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case of New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who was jailed after refusing to divulge her sources for a CIA identity leak.

"I started reading everything I could," he says, "and I really became converted. There are so many occasions in which a reporter was able to use an anonymous source and ultimately truth came out and major corruption was revealed."

Because Utah is one of only two states that doesn't have a shield law, Shurtleff began pushing for legislation. "I met with opposition ... from cops and prosecutors," he says. "I got nasty e-mails. They're saying, 'If I'm a cop and you have information, you have to give it to me.' But justice is better served in the end. We got the bill going in the Legislature. It met with so much opposition. Legislators and cops are asking me, 'Why are you doing this? Are you out of your mind?"'

Prosecutors convened to discuss the issue without inviting Shurtleff and elected a delegation to visit the attorney general to tell him to back off. As a compromise, the issue was turned over to the Supreme Court Rules of Evidence Advisory Committee to formulate a reporter's privilege law.

But of all the issues that Shurtleff has undertaken, the one he never saw coming was his prosecution of polygamists. Like everyone else in the state, he had simply ignored polygamy in a tacit agreement of live and let live. The predominantly Mormon population was certainly nervous about anything that smelled like religious persecution.

"I challenge you to find one time during my first campaign that the word polygamy crossed my lips," says Shurtleff.