Incumbent commonwealth’s attorneys in Arlington, Fairfax and Loudoun counties are all facing Democratic primary challenges this June. The contests, which will conclude on primary election day on June 20, have become arguments over what criminal justice reform in Northern Virginia should look like, and who is best placed to lead it.

All three incumbents — Parisa Dehghani-Tafti in Arlington, Steve Descano in Fairfax, and Buta Biberaj in Loudoun are considered progressive Democrats. All ran for office in 2019 on reform platforms, promising to shift from charging all crimes as aggressively as possible, and instead pushing for diversion, treatment, and an end to practices like cash bail and charging for simple marijuana possession.

“Not every social ill has to be criminalized,” Dehghani-Tafti says. “Not everything that’s criminalized has to result in incarceration … not every period of incarceration has to be so long and so onerous that it doesn’t leave room for rehabilitation and redemption.”

The challengers in all three jurisdictions say they are aligned with the incumbent’s reform principles. But they are highly critical of incumbents’ day-to-day management of the commonwealth attorney offices, pointing out problems with staff retention, missteps in court, and tension with judges and law enforcement.

“I felt the tug to re-engage because I didn’t think I was done with prosecuting,” says Josh Katcher, who left the Arlington commonwealth’s attorney office last summer after more than a decade. “I really didn’t want to see us miss out on this opportunity to get reform prosecution right in the 21st century.”

Katcher and his fellow challengers — Ed Nuttall in Fairfax and Elizabeth Lancaster in Loudoun — have also criticized the incumbents for what they believe are problems with how the office handles victims of crime.

Challengers have also suggested that current commonwealth’s attorneys are failing to adequately address community worries about crime. Crimes against individuals (things like murder, rape, assault) increased between 2020 and 2021, mostly in the simple assault category (there were no murders in 2021). Katcher has criticized Dehghani-Tafti for presiding over an increase in felony crimes but a decrease in indictments for those crimes — and generally says he has been unimpressed with what he believes is a lack of transparency from her office regarding crime.

“It is demonstrably true from a data and a fact standpoint that crimes of violence are up. And despite that fact, my opponent is denying that,” Katcher said. “That goes to her level of willingness to acknowledge things with the community.”

Incumbents, including Dehghani-Tafti, say stirring up election-year worries about crime is a political tactic that does not reflect the actual safety of the communities they serve.

What reform looks like 

The incumbent commonwealth’s attorneys point to key changes they’ve overseen in their first terms as steps forward in creating a more just and equitable criminal legal system.

The three offices stopped seeking the death penalty and charging simple marijuana possession in early 2020, decisions backed up shortly afterwards by legislation in Richmond.

Cash bail is another contentious issue in the criminal justice world; critics say requiring those arrested to post cash bail penalizes the poor. Dehghani-Tafti and Descano entirely ended the practice of detaining those who can’t post cash bail.

“Our twin goals of community safety and justice are not served by the negative consequences of detaining someone due to poverty or allowing a dangerous person to pay their way,” Descano wrote in a report on his first term achievements.

Last year, the Fairfax office published a data dashboard on pretrial detention across different offense types — information Descano is using to increase pretrial release for nonviolent crimes. (The Arlington challenger, Katcher, has said he would release similar data within a year of taking office — though Dehghani-Tafti argues that such a thing is unrealistic, based on longstanding inconsistencies in labeling cases in the office’s case management system.)

Reform prosecutors in the region say their philosophy of reducing incarceration overall was crucial in reducing the jail population during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Descano and Dehghani-Tafti have also sought to correct past mistakes made by the justice system. In Fairfax, Descano’s office argued for vacating hundreds of convictions based on evidence from a former police officer accused of stealing drugs from the police evidence room, planting drugs, illegal stops and racial profiling. Dehghani-Tafti is creating a conviction review unit in her office in Arlington to evaluate possible wrongful convictions. Her office no longer strikes jurors with no explanation.

Dehghani-Tafti has also touted the launch of a new restorative justice program, which offers an alternative to a traditional court process for some cases, if victims agree to it. The Katcher campaign argues the program’s outcomes have not been adequately reported to the public.

While a more holistic approach is a tenet of justice reform, in some cases, prosecutors in Northern Virginia have also sought harsh sentences. In Fairfax, Descano has been particularly aggressive in prosecuting gun crimes, sending 22-year-old D.C. rapper Noah Settles “No Savage” to prison for up to 33 years after he fired shots in a mall in Tysons. While Dehghani-Tafti says she generally avoids charging mandatory minimum sentences, she’s more likely to do so in cases involving fentanyl because the drug is so deadly.

All three incumbents have created and expanded diversion and treatment programs for people suffering from substance use disorder and mental health conditions. In Fairfax, Descano added a diversion program for services instead of incarceration for most defendants accused of nonviolent crimes, and if they complete the program, charges won’t appear on their criminal record.

In Arlington, Dehghani-Tafti helped install a behavioral health docket, which offers judicial supervision and intensive treatment to people who have a serious mental illness and/or a developmental disability. (Dehghani-Tafti’s opponent, Katcher, has said he supports the docket and would seek to maintain and expand it.)

Arlington Chief Public Defender Brad Haywood, who has been a vocal critic of the Katcher campaign, says a lack of community mental health services and crisis intervention options has pushed an enormous number of people in mental health crises into the county jail. He sees the docket as a modest but important success in beginning to find ways to handle that problem.

“Some people who have been clients of our office for a decade or longer, [who I] never thought would make a turnaround in their lives have actually done so,” he says. “They’re getting healthy and getting apartments and getting jobs.”

“We’re on a good trajectory now,” he says. “You have sort of a template for how progressive prosecution can be done.”

But not everyone is on board with that trajectory. All three reform prosecutors have faced recall efforts from community members who accused them of failing to enforce the law and damaging public safety, and Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Attorney General Jason Miyares have frequently singled out the Northern Virginia reformers as “soft on crime.”

‘The office is broken’

With few differences on policy, primary challengers are taking aim at the day-to-day management of the commonwealth’s attorney office and a lack support for victims. Moving reform work forward, they say, requires addressing those issues.

“My concern is that the execution has been so badly botched that the office is broken, which might lead people to believe that the [reform] ideas themselves are broken,” says Katcher. “And that’s just not correct.”

The Washington Post’s editorial page endorsed only one incumbent — Dehghani-Tafti, in Arlington — and favored challengers Ed Nuttall in Fairfax and Elizabeth Lancaster in Loudoun. The paper criticized Descano and Biberaj for mismanagement that led to failures in the courtroom.

In an appearance with his opponent on The Politics Hour with Kojo Nnamdi in April, Nuttall noted that Descano recently struggled to prosecute an officer accused of shooting and killing a person. In another case against a school bus driver who crashed the bus while drunk, Fairfax prosecutors missed discovery deadlines, mistakes that ultimately forced them to drop the most serious felony charges against the driver and agree to a much lighter jail sentence. A judicial opinion in one case in Arlington also offered criticisms that prosecutors had failed to provide evidence to the prosecution.

Nuttall has pledged to update systems in the prosecutor’s office, including instituting electronic discovery, as Dehghani-Tafti did in Arlington. He also plans to hire a training coordinator for inexperienced prosecutors.

In Loudoun, Biberaj’s office came under scrutiny for her role in the well-documented system-wide communication failures leading to a high school student who had sexually assaulted a classmate going on to assault a second student at another school (Lancaster, her challenger, represented both victims).

“What we are seeing is victims’ rights are not being met. Defendants’ rights are not being met,” Lancaster, a veteran public defender, told WJLA when she announced her primary challenge. “It is really in shambles.”

Biberaj pushed back on similar concerns about the treatment of victims from a member of the Board of Supervisors last year, noting that her office has increased the number of victim case managers from four to seven.

Nuttall and Katcher have also focused attacks on what they say is a lack of support for victims on the part of Descano and Dehghani-Tafti. Nuttall held a Victims’ Voices town hall event as part of his campaign. Katcher’s first television ad features Rose Kehoe, the mother of Braylon Meade, a 17-year-old student killed in a crash with another 17-year-old driver who was under the influence of THC and alcohol. Kehoe has spoken out about what she says was poor treatment by Dehghani-Tafti in the aftermath of the tragedy, and criticized her for not attempting to get the driver transferred to adult court for a stiffer sentence. (Supporters of Dehghani-Tafti have noted that the commonwealth asked for the maximum sentence.)

Katcher and Dehghani-Tafti have also fenced over his assertion that her office is in “free fall,” struggling to hire and retain attorneys, another common argument from all three primary challengers.

Katcher’s campaign said in a recent press release that the Arlington commonwealth’s attorney office had a 30% vacancy rate and high turnover of more than a dozen attorneys, which Katcher says is related to lack of support from Dehghani-Tafti.

“Lawyers are leaving, for the most part, for reasons related to management and leadership,” Katcher told progressive website Blue Virginia, in an interview following his campaign launch. “Not an insignificant number of them have said, ‘Give me a call if you win.’”

Dehghani-Tafti notes that some of the departures have been for other opportunities, including two judicial appointments. She says she has added a total of six attorney positions since taking office, and that only two attorney positions are currently open.

Nationwide, prosecutor offices are struggling to recruit and retain attorneys. Dehghani-Tafti says it’s especially difficult in Arlington, since longtime prosecutors do not always share the reform agenda (a difference in philosophy which, two of her employees told Patch, accounts for some of the office turnover).

Dehghani-Tafti and Descano have both spoken up about the challenges in their first term, including restructuring around reform prosecution and modernizing outdated systems. Dehghani-Tafti says she arrived to find that her office’s email system was not in sync with Arlington County’s, and that most existing electronic infrastructure was not secure. She also ended her predecessor’s practice of forcing defense attorneys to copy out discovery materials by hand in the prosecutor’s office, instead implementing an electronic system for sharing evidence, a practice Katcher says he supports too.

Tensions with law enforcement, judges

All three challengers have criticized incumbents for frayed relationships with law enforcement and judges on the bench. Police unions often oppose reforms that focus on police accountability, and they sometimes characterize other policies as “soft on crime.” Some judges are skeptical of efforts aimed at releasing people before trial or focusing on rehabilitation over punitive measures meant to deter crime.

“There’s a morale problem in the police department now due to the conflict between the Commonwealth’s attorney’s office and the police department,” said Nuttall in a candidate forum on The Politics Hour. “There’s a level of trust that’s missing there that we need to reestablish.”

In response, Descano suggested Nuttall, a defense attorney who has represented police officers in misconduct cases, is too cozy with local law enforcement unions.

In Arlington, Katcher has made similar criticisms of Dehghani-Tafti’s ability to build relationships with law enforcement and also judges on the bench. He argues he’d be better placed to do so, with his long history in the commonwealth’s attorney’s office.

“We have to have working relationships with those partners for us to accomplish the reform that we want,” he said.

The tensions in the system in Arlington have not been entirely one-sided, Dehghani-Tafti points out. Circuit court judges have shown serious skepticism of reform, requiring her attorneys to write extensive briefs supporting charging decisions, which some say infringes on the traditional discretion due an elected prosecutor. In a Post editorial, she recounted an instance in which a judge demanded ten pages of briefing to dismiss a simple marijuana possession charge in which the accused had a medical marijuana card.

Political back-and-forth 

The campaigns have gotten heated politically, with incumbents and their supporters suggesting challengers aren’t truly committed to principles of reform.

Descano called Nuttall “a Republican wolf in Democrat’s clothing” on The Politics Hour, citing Nuttall’s close ties with law enforcement. Nuttall responded that good officers support prosecuting police misconduct, and said he would do so effectively if elected commonwealth’s attorney.

In Arlington, Dehghani-Tafti questioned Katcher’s background working for her predecessor, Theo Stamos, who is now employed by Virginia’s Attorney General Jason Miyares, a prominent critic of the reform movement. Dehghani-Tafti argues that Katcher’s service under a more traditional prosecutor is evidence that Katcher is not sincerely committed to reform.

“I worked with him for two and a half years,” she says. “So it does not surprise me that he would seek support from people who are antithetical to reform.”

Katcher points out that Dehghani-Tafti promoted him to a supervisory position in her office, and that putting him in a position to help train and mentor younger prosecutors would be a strange choice if she believed he didn’t share reform-oriented ideas. And he categorically denies claims that he is not a Democrat or not committed to reform, noting previous leadership roles for the local party committee.

“This idea that she’s trying to push that I’m some type of secret Republican is insane and absurd,” he said. He said the political attacks are an indicator of a lack of substance in Dehghani-Tafti’s campaign, and a “disappointing” shift away from the issues.

Critics of Katcher, including former county board candidate Adam Theo, have taken to social media with what they say is evidence of Katcher appealing to conservative or anti-reform people, including a supportive email from Stamos herself and a flier that appears to push Republican voters to cast ballots for Katcher. (There is no Republican running for commonwealth’s attorney currently. Katcher said his campaign “had nothing to do with” the flier.)

Katcher’s opponents are also circulating a transcript of a bond hearing from July 2022 in which he quotes a defendant’s phone call for the record, including stating the n-word. That proved explosive on Twitter, where some defended quoting the word in a legal context as a matter of accuracy, while others argued it was unnecessary.

Another attack on Katcher is over his donor list, which critics are holding up as evidence that he is attracting contributions from former Stamos supporters and people with a history of donating to state and local Republican candidates. About fifty of Katcher’s nearly 300 donors have previously supported Stamos, raising nearly $40,000 for her in the past; forty donors have contributed to state and local Republican campaigns in the past, according to a WAMU/DCist review of state and local campaign donations as tracked by the Virginia Public Access Project. (For donations made in the past year, Dehghani-Tafti has two donors who have previously given to state and local Republican campaigns and two who have previously given to Stamos.)

Both campaigns’ donors have contributed far more to Democrats than Republicans overall. Katcher dismisses claims that his donor list indicates how he would approach policy in office.

“We are neither seeking out nor encouraging Republican support,” he told WAMU/DCist. “That I’m a Democrat and a reform prosecutor is front and center to all my literature, and I say it in front of every single audience.”

Dehghani-Tafti says that “doesn’t pass the sniff test.”

“You don’t just get thousands of dollars of donations dropped in your lap without asking for them,” she says. “No candidate sits down to call time without knowing who they’re calling,” referring to the fundraising calls candidates make.

In Arlington and Fairfax, Katcher and Nuttall had a notable fundraising edge over the incumbents as of their last finance filings in April. In Loudoun, Lancaster’s campaign does not appear to have filed a campaign finance report.

Some see a broader appeal across the ideological spectrum as a strength of challengers’ campaigns, not a weakness. In Arlington, that includes John Vihstadt, a former member of the Arlington County Board who broke with the Republican party over its support of former president Donald Trump. Vihstadt is now supporting Katcher, pointing to concerns about crime and management issues in the office.

“The office of prosecutor is an office for everybody in the county,” he told WAMU/DCist. “People say justice is blind and justice needs to be blind to partisan politics as well.”

Vihstadt also pointed to Katcher’s endorsements from prominent Arlingtonians working on social justice issues, including housing and schools advocate Janeth Valenzuela and former school board candidate Symone Walker, as evidence of his progressive values.

But Haywood remains skeptical, and frustrated by what he sees as a lack of substantive policy proposals from the Katcher campaign.

“He’s playing both sides and not distancing himself from the people and the policies of the past,” he said.

It remains to be seen if the increasingly ugly back-and-forth between the campaigns captures voters’ attention, particularly for a primary expected to have low turnout.

This story has been updated to clarify the position of the Arlington public defender.