Virginia Commonwealth's attorneys frequently let criminals walk
After a registered sex offender was arrested twice in three days on felony charges in Northern Virginia, local leaders are wondering what it takes to land a criminal behind bars when lenient prosecutors backed by George Soros are administering justice.
The serial CVS bandit, Karim Clayton, 44, has a seedy criminal history ranging from menacing a CVS employee with a knife to leading police on a high-speed chase on a major regional thoroughfare.
But Fairfax County prosecutor Steve Descano and Arlington County prosecutor Parisa Dehghani-Tafti—who cruised to victory with six-figure donations from Soros—have brought charges against Clayton at least a dozen times between them, only to abandon their cases or plead him out on paltry misdemeanors with almost no jail time.
"Radical leftist prosecutors like Steve Descano and Parisa Dehghani-Tafti do not represent the public or crime victims," said Sean Kennedy, president of Virginians for Safe Communities. "Their allegiances lie with criminal defendants first, last, and always."
A two-year-long spike in violent crime is a political hazard for President Joe Biden and Democrats. Virginia governor-elect Glenn Youngkin (R.) hammered a public safety message throughout his campaign, promising to fully fund law enforcement and fire an inmate-friendly state parole board. Republican candidates in the commonwealth are homing in on a similar strategy ahead of next year's midterm elections.
Thus far, Clayton’s twin arrests in the last week of September have netted him only three months in prison. He was arrested for assault and battery on Sunday, Sept. 26, in Fairfax County and released on bail Monday morning, according to Virginia court records. That case has not yet been resolved. Authorities arrested Clayton the very next day in Arlington County for stealing from a CVS.
Court records show Clayton was sentenced to 12 months in jail after Dehghani-Tafti's office pled him down to a misdemeanor for the CVS robbery. He can serve nine of those months on probation, however, meaning he will spend just 90 days behind bars.
On a separate occasion in June 2020, Clayton robbed a CVS in Chantilly, Va., in broad daylight. Clayton fled in a 2016 Dodge Journey and led authorities on an extended chase with speeds exceeding 100 miles per hour. The chase ended when Clayton crashed in Arlington.
Clayton faced a felony eluding and disregarding police charge, which Descano’s office pled down to a misdemeanor in September 2020, according to court records. He was sentenced to 180 days in prison, but could log up to 170 of them on probation. He also faced a felony assault on law enforcement charge arising from that event from Dehghani-Tafti's office, which was abandoned in September 2020.
Apart from his Northern Virginia crime spree, Clayton registered as a sex offender in Washington, D.C., following a 2015 conviction for abuse of a child. He lives one-third of a mile from an elementary school, according to a home address listed on a sex offender registry. He’s been prosecuted in D.C. courts for driving under the influence, tampering with a GPS ankle monitor he was required to wear as a condition of...
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