Attorney General Miyares urges Fairfax Commonwealth’s Attorney to resign, alleging incompetence and victims’ rights violations.
FAIRFAX, Va. — The Virginia Attorney General is asking the Fairfax Commonwealth’s Attorney to resign. Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares said an investigation into the Fairfax Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office found a pattern of what he calls unconstitutional policies and violations of victims’ rights.
Miyares released their investigative report, which details 17 cases, on Friday. He said they found Fairfax Commonwealth’s Attorney, Steve Descano, has shown repeated incompetence and failed to protect victims.
“Stop being a social worker, stop being a criminal defense attorney, and start being a prosecutor. And if you’re not willing to do your job, resign so somebody else will do it for you,” said Miyares at a press conference at the Fairfax County Courthouse on Friday.
Standing in front of victims and families who said the justice department failed them, Miyares said he started the investigation into Descano’s office in July, after an abduction of a three-year-old girl at the Fair Oaks mall was caught on tape.
The suspect, Andres-Caceres-Jaldin, had been released on bond for a felony hit-and-run three days earlier.
“The Governor asked our Office of the Attorney General to both, not just investigate this matter, but look at the entire pattern of failure,” said Miyares.
He said their investigation looked at years of evidence and found Descano violated victims’ rights, failed to provide evidence, showed leniency to undocumented immigrants, proposed improper plea agreements, and didn’t enforce mandatory minimum sentences.
“Dozens and dozens, if not hundreds of instances, where the Fairfax Commonwealth’s Attorney Office, Steve Descano, has refused to do his job. And as a result of his incompetence and his failure to do his job, people have been hurt or killed,” said Miyares.
Descano denied the allegations, saying in a statement:
“This is a sad, last-ditch political stunt by a man who’s about to lose an election. His lies, half-truths, and distortions don’t change the fact that voters elected me twice to run our justice system this way, and in doing so, we’ve kept Fairfax the safest large county of its size in the country. If the AG doesn’t like how we do things here, he’s welcome to run for Commonwealth’s Attorney.”
Victims and families who said they feel let down by Fairfax County met at the courthouse on Friday, some saying they don’t want their cases to be politicized.
“Both parties have people who’ve been affected by this. And I do think it does us, as victims, a disservice to concentrate on that kind of nonsense, because we deserve to be the focus,” said Rachel Pelovitz, who said her case has not been prosecuted despite repeated appeals to the Fairfax County Attorney’s Office.
Denita Norris Blackwell is the mother of D’Mari Norris, who was murdered in August 2022.
“It just doesn’t feel safe. Like Fairfax is for the criminals, that’s what it feels like,” said Norris Blackwell.
She said her son’s case was wrongly dismissed.
“The system failed from the jump. The boy was out on bond before I even got to see my son’s body.”
Miyares said he is referring his office’s findings to the US Department of Justice for further investigation and is asking the Virginia General Assembly to enact several reforms, he says could prevent the mishandling of future cases throughout the state.
Those proposed reforms include expanding the prosecutorial discretion of the Office of the Attorney General to include any sex crime against a minor, resuming a rebuttable presumption against bail for some violent offenses, and establishing a working group to assess and analyze statewide compliance with the Crime Victim and Witness Rights Act. Miyares said the working group should develop a plan to assess the evaluation of input from victims when plea agreements, charging agreements, and sentencing agreements are crafted and conveyed to defendants and their attorneys.