Marina Tucker

If elected as Park County’s next county and prosecuting attorney, Marina Tucker says she’ll work to keep crime rates low and partner with law enforcement. And Tucker says she’ll also work to provide solid legal advice to county officials, “regardless of whether or not it’s what people want to hear.”

“Sometimes when you say, ‘This is what you need to do to follow the law,’ people don't necessarily like that or want to do that,” the current deputy prosecutor said in a recent interview. However, she said she intends “to stand firm on those issues and not be swayed by other agendas or other opinions or pressures from other groups.”

Background

Originally from Ohio, Tucker started her career in social work, obtaining a master’s degree in clinical psychology and becoming a licensed mental health counselor. She started getting directly involved with the judicial system as an evaluator for Family Court Services in Washington state.

Family courts hear cases involving domestic violence, child abuse and child custody issues, and Tucker’s role was to gather information and then tell a judge what services were needed, what risks of violence or abuse might be faced by the children involved and make recommendations as a neutral party.

Tucker felt the work helped the court “make much better, informed decisions about children and about families,” but it also resurrected her long-held desire to go to law school. She obtained her juris doctor from Tulane University in 2019, then took a job in Billings with the Crowley Fleck law firm.

During her five-and-a-half years at the private firm, Tucker worked cases involving complex and high-dollar commercial and tort litigation, including insurance defense for personal injury claims. She also represented some plaintiffs in actions involving breach of contract, property disputes and estate litigation, she said.

Tucker’s work ranged from reviewing contracts to counseling companies on how they could avoid being sued again to providing advice on how to lawfully terminate an employee in Montana.

“The breadth of cases that I worked on and the types of clients that I worked for have prepared me very well to represent the county,” she said.

Work as a prosecutor

Tucker later decided that “my heart was really just not in that work,” and joined the Yellowstone County Attorney’s Office in early 2025. In her role as a prosecutor, “I felt like I was doing work that really aligned with my values again,” she said.

Tucker mostly handled misdemeanor cases in Billings, including speeding tickets, DUIs, assaults and domestic violence, plus some felony cases. Within an understaffed office, she said she carried about 800 cases at a time — including up to four bench trials a day — versus the roughly 100 misdemeanor, felony  and juvenile cases she juggles in Park County.

Her journey to Park County began when she began dating a Cody native and found she loved the area. After securing her current job with the county attorney’s office, Tucker decided to make the move.

Working at the office over the past year “has been tremendous,” she said, from the range of the casework to positive relationships with law enforcement and the Department of Family Services.

Tucker would like to create more collaboration and teamwork between everyone in the county attorney’s office. She thinks it would be helpful and important to hold all-staff meetings that would rotate between the Cody and Powell offices.

“I think we’ve become a little too reliant on the remote stuff,” Tucker said. “I understand it’s convenient, and sometimes it’s unavoidable, honestly, but [in-person is] for that unity of the office, for getting feedback.”

Treating everyone equally 

Tucker has received the endorsement of outgoing County Attorney Bryan Skoric, but not the Park County Republican Party, which backed her opponent, fellow Deputy Park County Prosecuting Attorney Ericka Smith of Powell.

The party sent out a questionnaire to local Republican candidates earlier this year that asked about their alignment with the GOP’s platform, but Tucker declined to return it. Tucker said she agrees with a good portion of the platform presented in the survey, “but not in the way that it’s stated, not in the way that it was presented.”

“The tone of it, the way it was sent out, I had concern that it was more a test of who can be influenced and who will toe the party line more than it was an actual evaluation of values,” Tucker said. “And I think some of that is borne out in how people were selected …”

Tucker also said she had some concerns about the questions being “internally contradictory,” saying the first plank’s wording about supporting life from conception to “natural death” implies an anti-death penalty stance. She added that, as a lawyer, she swore an oath to uphold the Constitution and said she believes some of the statements related to the interplay of religion and politics were unconstitutional.

Overall, Tucker said that as a county attorney, “it’s very important to be fair, unbiased [and] treat everybody equally, regardless.”

Tucker and Smith will face off in the Aug. 18 Republican primary.

(Editor's note: The list of case types that Tucker juggles in Park County has been reordered for clarity.)