More About Shane

Shane Johnson was born in tiny Pendleton, Oregon to grocery-store clerks, and grew up poor on the west side of Salt Lake County. Somewhere along the way — probably way too many episodes into NYPD Blue as a teen — he got it in his head that his calling was in law enforcement.

That illusion didn’t last long.

While studying criminal justice, Shane realized he didn’t click with the law-and-order set. One classmate casually told him he planned to become a corrupt cop in New Jersey alongside his on-the-take cousin. Others openly defended policing through racial profiling because, “minorities commit all the crimes.”

Shane switched majors the next semester.

Instead, he turned to journalism — exposing the misdeeds of the powerful and giving regular folks a platform. As a reporter for Salt Lake City Weekly, Shane wrote long-form investigative pieces that rattled cages across Utah. He dug into wrongful convictions, excessive force, whistleblowers, and official corruption — scoops that didn’t make it into press releases or police reports.

He learned a lot researching and writing those stories. Mostly, that the system coddles the powerful, grinds the rest of us into dirt, and criminals live on both sides of the walls.

But journalism only went so far.

So Shane went deeper — becoming a private investigator, and eventually a criminal defense attorney. His work helped people accused of everything from marijuana cultivation to capital murder —  with oh-so-many DUIs and domestic violence cases in between. He took a parking ticket to the Utah Supreme Court, and lost, but he and his team won a class action civil rights lawsuit against the State of Utah's Department of Corrections requiring curative treatment for all inmates suffering from Hepatitis C. 

Optimally, Shane gets criminal cases kicked out of court on pretrial motions for bad police work. Otherwise, he battles in court for not-guilty verdicts, or grinds it out on the phone with prosecutors to strike deals that keep his dead-to-rites clients out of jail or prison.

Today, as a criminal defense attorney, Shane approaches every case like a journalist, investigator, and advocate rolled into one. He doesn’t trust allegations without evidence. He doesn’t trust evidence without scrutiny. And he doesn’t trust power without accountability. If you’re looking for a lawyer to bleed you out and plead you broke, keep moving.

Shane lives for the work.