One invaluable lesson David Schwendiman (JD ’76) learned throughout his career as a prosecutor was to admit what he didn’t know and embrace a new education with each opportunity that came his way. His various roles and assignments within the military, the Utah Attorney General’s Office, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the U.S. Department of State, for example, could all be viewed as building blocks preparing him for the next challenge ahead.
“When you’re asked to talk about a 50-year career, it all comes out sounding preplanned, and while some of it was planned, a lot of it was just opportunity that I said ‘yes’ to when asked and then took a big leap. Some opportunities came out of the blue. They certainly weren’t things I thought would ever happen,” Schwendiman says. “Every time I took on something new, I thought I knew what I was doing and learned within a few hours that I didn’t know anything. So it became a blessing where every opportunity gave me a chance to retool and challenge myself with fresh responsibilities.”
In the end, he credits the people who taught him the law at the S.J. Quinney College of Law for the success he’s experienced.
Discovering an interest in law
From an early age, Schwendiman spent his summers and weekends working at his father and grandfather’s print shop in downtown Salt Lake City, which printed, among other things, briefs for the attorneys who represented clients before the Utah Supreme Court. As the delivery boy, he formed associations with the attorneys around town and within his neighborhood.
“I pulled the proofs after the briefs were typeset on the magical linotype machines and read them in galley because they fascinated me. I still remember one involving the Sunday closing law,” he recalls. “I took the galleys to law offices in the city for editing and revision and then delivered the bound briefs that were filed with the court.”
Schwendiman even watched some attorneys present their arguments in the old courtroom for the Supreme Court at the Utah Capitol building and felt mesmerized by what he saw and heard.
“That old courtroom—the smell, the look, the feel—it was enticing. Many years later when I started out at the Attorney General’s Office, I actually argued a few cases in that very same courtroom before judges who presided over some of the arguments I watched as a boy. Justice J. Allen Crockett (JD ’31) asked me at the beginning of one argument, ‘Fred Schwendiman? The printer? Are you his grandson?’ Not sure how well that went over with the other side,” he says.
When President John F. Kennedy came to Utah in 1963 to speak at the Tabernacle on Temple Square, an awestruck 16-year-old Schwendiman pushed his way in to hear. Afterward, like so many others his age, he felt inspired to serve his community and make a difference.
While attending the University of Utah as a track and field athlete, Schwendiman pursued an honors degree in American Studies. He recalls the jurisprudence and legal theory courses he took from Professor Francis Wormuth and says he “fell hard for the law as subject matter.” Then in 1972, when his athletic eligibility ended, Schwendiman took the LSAT to see if a legal career might be a possibility for him.
“To my surprise, my results and my grades looked good enough to get me into law school, so I applied to the College of Law. I would not receive my undergraduate degree until 1974, but I was accepted into the class of 1976 anyway. It was possible to do that 50 years ago. I jumped at the chance and never looked back,” Schwendiman says.
And law school did not disappoint. Schwendiman struggled, like many students, with the academic rigor, discipline and time management, but he remembers the faculty and their willingness to help him succeed fondly.
“The people who taught me and encouraged me, though I was not a standout student, gave back as much as I was willing to give of myself in time and effort,” Schwendiman says. “Ed Firmage, Ron Boyce, and John Flynn all took an interest and saw something in me. They challenged me and pushed me. When I felt overwhelmed, they encouraged me to embrace the difficulty and rigor required to keep up.”
During his second year in law school, Schwendiman was commissioned as a naval officer. He attended officer candidate school that summer in Rhode Island and then was detailed to the Navy Legal Services Office on Treasure Island, where he worked in the military justice section before returning for his final year of law school. The decision to enlist laid the groundwork for his future career.
“Treasure Island was an eye-opener because I got to prosecute cases in special courts-martial with a mentor—a terrific Marine Corps officer—who was willing to clean up my messes as I made them,” Schwendiman says. “And it thrilled me! I thought, ‘Wow! If trial work is like this, that’s something I really want to do.’”
Beginning a law career in the military
After graduating and before assuming active duty in the Navy, Schwendiman spent a year at the Utah Attorney General’s Office. “For a whole bunch of really strange reasons” he worked on the high-profile State v. Gary Gilmore case and helped write the state’s briefs in Bessie Gilmore v. Utah, the case that reached the U.S. Supreme Court and cleared the way for Gilmore’s execution in January 1977. (Gary Gilmore was the first person executed in the United States after the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.) It was the first of many significant cases that would describe the arc of his career.
For the next seven years, Schwendiman served on active duty as a JAG officer, honing his trial skills as both a prosecutor and defense counsel in special and general courts-martial and providing legal advice to senior officers. He returned to the Utah Attorney General’s Office in 1983 to join a special unit set up to investigate and prosecute unique cases—including fraud, child abuse, and murder cases throughout the state. He represented the state in appeals in State v. Pierre Dale Selby, in which one of the men convicted in the Ogden Hi-Fi murders case was executed.
Then in 1987, Schwendiman was offered a position in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Utah, where he handled violent crimes, homicides, drug investigations, and prosecutions.
“What I was privileged to do in the Department of Justice and the people I got to know and work with in Utah, Washington, and overseas exposed me to another dimension of practice that added to my competence and increased my confidence,” Schwendiman says. “The lessons of integrity, professionalism, and independence I learned from mentors and people with whom I worked, the standards set by people I admired and respected and whose examples I have tried to emulate, have informed everything I’ve done as a lawyer.”
He spent more than 25 years with the Department of Justice (DOJ) and highlights his service as first assistant to U.S. Attorney Scott M. Matheson, Jr. (1993–1997) and then later as the interim U.S. attorney in 1998 after Matheson became dean at the College of Law. Schwendiman values Matheson’s friendship and insight and considers him to be a great mentor.
Organizers of the 2002 Olympic Winter Games in Salt Lake City gave Schwendiman a special assignment to work on security and counter-terrorism preparations and operations. The assignment also involved working as one of the attorney general’s representatives at the Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia, in 2000 and in Athens, Greece, in 2004.
“Attorney General Janet Reno came to Utah in 1998 to check on planning for the games and insisted an assistant U.S. attorney support the effort. That work was so intense from the start that we were well prepared when 9-11 happened,” he says. “Nobody anticipated such a thing, but our security plans were already in place. We had done extensive tabletop and full-field exercises. We knew what we were doing and were as prepared as any place in the world for what might happen when Utah took to the world stage in 2002.”
In addition, Schwendiman began teaching trial advocacy, forensic evidence, and international criminal law and has been an adjunct professor at the College of Law since 1994. When he assumed this new mantle, his law professors were there to offer support and guidance.
“Professor Ron Boyce was Magistrate Judge Boyce by that time, and he invited me into his fabled book-crowded office at the law school to talk me through some ways to approach teaching and its challenges and responsibilities. Professor Flynn did the same thing. It wasn’t something I anticipated from either of them; they just did it,” Schwendiman says. “It speaks volumes about the kind of commitment you get from people at the College of Law. They stick with you over time because they look for something in you that you might not recognize in yourself. They want you to make the most of it.”
Prosecuting war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina
In 2005, a new opportunity opened for Schwendiman while he was on assignment for the DOJ. While inspecting the newly converted courthouse in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Schwendiman met Michael Johnson, who served as the chief project manager and international registrar for the court there. Johnson asked whether Schwendiman had ever considered doing war crimes work, as he was tasked with creating an international team of prosecutors in the state prosecutor’s office to investigate and try war crimes committed during the 1992-1995 war in former Yugoslavia.
“I didn’t give it much thought then and left Sarajevo. Soon after I got home, there was a little tombstone ad in the back of The Economist saying, ‘Prosecutor’s Office of Bosnia-Herzegovina seeks an international prosecutor for war crimes work,’” Schwendiman recalls. “I was helping Wayne McCormack teach his international criminal law class at the time and responded just to get information for the students about opportunities working internationally, even doing war crimes work. Within an hour of emailing the address listed, I got a call from that office saying, ‘Michael Johnson saw your email. When can you start?”’
Two weeks later, after conferring with his wife, Schwendiman was back in Sarajevo working out the details for his next appointment. He arranged a leave of absence from the DOJ, and within a month—give or take a few days—Schwendiman and his wife relocated there in spring 2006. He was the only American and the newest member of the Special Department for War Crimes in the Prosecutor’s Office for Bosnia and Herzegovina.
“For the first time in my life, I was driven past buildings that had been blown to bits in a beautiful and historic city still trying to recover from the war. It was a place completely foreign to anything I’d ever done or thought I’d be doing,” he says. “I was enamored by the idea that I would be another Justice Robert H. Jackson at Nuremberg, going into the courtroom to make these profound statements about humanity and vindicate these great principles in prosecuting atrocity and holding people to account, but I was far from it. I had a great deal to learn about the job and myself before I could even hope to be effective at anything in my new world.”
Nonetheless, Schwendiman kept Justice Jackson’s spirit with him as he began working on cases. By the end of 2007, he was appointed deputy chief prosecutor of the state prosecutor’s office and head of the Special Department for War Crimes, responsible for the day-to-day management and oversight of approximately 100 people, including domestic and international prosecutors, investigators, and staff. Over time, the staff included student interns from the College of Law.
“I worked with some very experienced Bosnian lawyers, English and Australian barristers, and practitioners from other countries and systems. Many of the staff came from continental law systems, and some were experienced war crimes investigators and prosecutors. We all learned an entirely new judicial system, a common law system Bosnia’s international overseers grafted onto the existing Yugoslavian socialist model of criminal law and practice,” Schwendiman says. “The real test was learning how to operate within it, working with the simultaneous translation in the courtrooms before a panel of international and Bosnian judges while taking evidence from witnesses who were horribly damaged by what they lived through and lost during the war.”
He considers his time in Bosnia and Herzegovina to be the most challenging and most rewarding of his career.
“As an executive prosecutor, I also learned how to manage the politics that worked their way into nearly everything we did,” he says. “But the small part I played in the location, excavation, exhumation, identification, and the restoration of identities to those who were slaughtered in Bosnia—and what I did to help return their remains to those who cared about them—is the most challenging and rewarding thing I’ve ever done as a lawyer and human being.”
Tackling new challenges in Afghanistan and Europe
Schwendiman returned to the U.S. Attorney’s Office with a wealth of international experience after four years in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Yet his return was short-lived. He received another special assignment as justice attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. In 2014, he retired from the DOJ and returned to Kabul to become director of forward operations for the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).
“I learned as much as I could about Afghanistan—its history, people, post-2001 experience, government, laws, Islam, Sharia, and different schools of Muslim thought and jurisprudence—because of the work I had to do, but also because I was fascinated by it,” he says. “I went into the field every chance I could to learn more firsthand, even in the most dangerous places, to gain the trust of Afghans who did know. Eventually, I was able to give reasonably well-informed and reliable advice. I could also introduce people in the embassy to my Afghan informants and mentors so they could give the ambassador and others, including congressional visitors and our military counterparts, the best information to work from when they were faced with questions of Afghan law and practice.”
Indeed, Schwendiman developed such a unique perspective from his four years in Afghanistan that in 2024 Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction John Soko asked him to participate in writing SIGAR’s final report, an assessment of the 20-year U.S. reconstruction effort in Afghanistan, which was published in 2026.
Opportunity knocked once again in 2015 when Schwendiman was asked to become a senior foreign service officer with the U.S. Department of State and accepted an assignment from the European Union to lead a task force investigating the atrocity allegedly committed in Kosovo during its conflict with Serbia from 1998–2000.
“I landed in Brussels with the same lack of knowledge and experience that characterized every place I’d landed before, but with a lot less arrogance,” he says.
Within a year, the task force reorganized as the Kosovo Specialist Prosecutor’s Office and moved to The Hague, Netherlands, where Schwendiman became the specialist (chief) prosecutor, a position he held until 2018.
Reflecting on 50 years of law practice
Through all these experiences, Schwendiman is mindful of the lessons he learned as a law student in John Flynn’s jurisprudence courses. In fact, he continued his friendship with Flynn throughout his career, until Flynn passed away in 2010.
“I owe Professor Flynn a great deal. He drilled into me the need to challenge assumptions, to never accept anything without testing it no matter who or what was behind it, to always seek out the ethical and professional path, to speak and act with integrity and independence, and to use my imagination rather than merely accept convention,” Schwendiman says. “Simply, he taught me what being a lawyer was all about or should be about. Most importantly, he insisted that all his students strive to be exemplary lawyers and advocates. I took those lessons to heart. There were very few days in my professional life when I did not ask myself, ‘What would John Flynn do?’”
Now an alum of 50 years, Schwendiman has learned a few things about himself and the law. From the early days working on the Gary Gilmore and Pierre Dale Selby cases to later days prosecuting war crimes, he’s realized that he can evolve and change perspective. Though he was a principal player in two executions, he no longer views the death penalty as an appropriate or effective punishment. He’s also learned that law can take the measure of power.
“If we are committed to the rule of law and play our part well in respecting and defending it, we can protect the vulnerable and promote the best in us. Doing war crimes work, I learned that we can, at least, hold those who abuse power accountable and ensure that the courtroom is a place where those who commit violence have no power over their victims.”
Though he has learned to say ‘no’ on occasion, Schwendiman is still involved with some legal projects. Currently, he serves on a conviction integrity panel for the Salt Lake County District Attorney’s Office Conviction Integrity Unit, where he works with others to review claims of wrongful conviction.
Overall, he encourages the future generation of lawyers “to see the practice of law as more than just a way of earning a living, but as a wonderful way to spend your life.”
“That’s what it’s been for me. Government work does not pay terribly well, but the pay is good enough. If you think of adventure as currency, it pays extremely well,” Schwendiman says. “For me, the adventure of the law has always been about the challenges and what I got to do. It was about doors that opened and the things I experienced along the way. Mainly, it was about the people I was privileged to serve and serve alongside.”