Norfolk Reelects its Reform Prosecutor, Capping Years of Heated Debate

It’s a staple in political campaigns: Candidates bring up a criminal case that occurred on their opponent’s watch, and use it to attack them for being too lenient. Still, Michelle Monfiletto, a public defender in Norfolk, Virginia, had never seen one of her own clients dragged into that tactic. 

This spring, she came across a website promoted by a local candidate for prosecutor, John Butler, that painted Norfolk Commonwealth’s Attorney Ramin Fatehi as too soft on crime, using a case she’d worked on as evidence. Her client was ultimately sentenced to 12 years in prison for sex crimes, and Butler’s camp portrayed this as far too little. That made Monfiletto “nervous” that Norfolk may be in for a punitive turn. “Twelve years is nothing to sneeze at,” she says. “Maybe there’s an argument to be made that he deserved more time, but I don’t think 12 years is not holding someone accountable.” 

The campaign ended last Tuesday as Norfolk voters reelected Fatehi as their commonwealth’s attorney. He defeated Butler by five percentage points in the Democratic primary. 

No one is running against him in the November general election in this blue-leaning city, Virginia’s third most populous, which means that he is all but guaranteed a second term. 

Fatehi thinks his win is a sign that voters are on board with the reform policies he has pushed locally in Norfolk, and also statewide as part of an alliance of like-minded prosecutors. 

“They showed us once again that we can run as progressive prosecutors, without apology, and win,” he told Bolts after his victory.

The election caps years of debate over criminal justice reform in Norfolk, a city that has one of Virginia’s highest incarceration rates. When Greg Underwood, Fatehi’s predecessor and then-boss, announced he’d stop prosecuting marijuana possession in 2019, it provoked a furor from some local officials who tried to block his policy. 

Then, in 2021, Fatehi won the election to replace the retiring Underwood on promises to use the office to reduce incarceration. He vowed to break with the traditional culture of prosecutors who “feed mass incarceration,” and to counter Norfolk’s legacy of segregation and redlining that, he said, have impoverished the city and spurred crime. In March of 2022, he rolled out alternative policies meant to limit the prosecution of kids in adult court, sidestep mandatory minimums, and reduce the severity of some offenses he thinks are rooted in poverty. 

Other city leaders, chief among them Mayor Kenny Alexander and Sheriff Joe Baron, disagreed with his approach. As crime surged in Norfolk and nationwide during the pandemic and the early part of Fatehi’s tenure, they urged Fatehi to bring to the office a “prosecutorial philosophy and practice that keeps offenders off the streets,” as Alexander put it at a 2023 press conference. 

“These folks put pressure on me in 2022 to engage in general deterrence and send a message. ‘Get tough,’” Fatehi recalls. “I said to them, I am not going to do that. I’m not going to triple and quadruple sentences beyond what they deserve to try and send some sort of message. That doesn’t work.” He added that those are “1990s or Republican ideas about criminal justice.” 

Fatehi says he’s been vindicated by the recent decline in violent crime in Norfolk. Homicides last year dropped to their lowest since 2015; they were down 43 percent compared to 2021, the last year before Fatehi took office. 

Alexander and Baron, who are both Democrats, still endorsed Fatehi’s challenger this spring. Butler also drew support from local business leaders and local police and fire unions. The Norfolk Republican Party also urged its base to turn out for Butler in the Democratic primary, as is allowed in Virginia. (Butler’s campaign did not respond to questions for this article.)

Delegate Jackie Glass, a Democrat who represents Norfolk in Virginia’s House and supported Fatehi’s reelection bid, defends his approach to not pursuing every case full throttle.

Glass says prosecutors should be “thoughtful” about how escalating criminal convictions can destabilize communities. For instance, Fatehi encourages his staff to treat theft cases of property under $2,500 as misdemeanors, even though state law allows for felony-level charges.

“Felonies have lasting consequences,” Glass told Bolts. “The system that we set up in Virginia incentivizes commonwealth’s attorneys to get felony convictions, and that leads to folks who can’t get the better jobs, who can’t apply for housing—you see the trickle in all these other things that are social determinants for crimes in our city.” She added, of reform critics, “I just wish they would connect those dots.”

Fatehi performed well on Tuesday in the precincts that make up Glass’ district, which contains many of Norfolk’s Black neighborhoods. 

In fact, he won upwards of 60 percent of the vote in many of Norfolk’s predominantly Black precincts. These wide margins carried him to his overall victory, a demographic pattern that has shaped other recent elections featuring a reform candidate. 

Monfiletto, who works as a deputy in the juvenile division of the public defender’s office, says the single biggest difference she’s seen since Fatehi came into office in 2021 has been a large reduction in the transfer of children to adult court; that practice opens up minors to drastically harsher sentences. 

“I absolutely gotta give him his props for not transferring kids,” she said, adding that she used to spend a lot of time in court fighting transfer requests, but no longer. “It’s just a super, super punitive measure, and it’s a relic of the 90s superpredator myth.” 

Fatehi does not rule out transferring children to adult court, but he requires that a line prosecutor get approval from him or his chief deputy before ordering any such transfer. “The fact that those decisions have to go through me is a big brake,” he said. He uses that same approach of requiring supervisory approval for other practices that he wants to diminish, though not ban altogether, for instance when it comes to charges that trigger a mandatory minimum sentence. 

Still, on issues besides juvenile transfers, Monfiletto sees a gap between Fatehi’s stated policies and realities in the courtroom. His prosecutors ask for decadeslong sentences that she thinks are indistinguishable from the life sentences that he has said he’ll curtail. And while his office won’t seek cash bail to avoid detaining people just because they’re poor, she says prosecutors at times replace cash bail by asking that a defendant be denied pretrial release altogether. 

She also agrees with Fatehi’s critics who say his office is plagued by mismanagement and by a high volume of staff turnover. Fatehi has said this turnover is about low pay and a high caseload, but Monfiletto notes that this has posed major challenges for her clients, leaving them with long wait times before they undergo trial.

For supporters of criminal justice reform in Virginia, the next big battle is set for November, when Democrats hope to regain control of the state government by flipping the governorship and keeping control of the state House. (The Democratic-run Senate is not on the ballot.)

The last time Democrats ran the state, from 2020 to 2022, they passed a flurry of criminal justice reform laws from abolishing the death penalty and ending juvenile life without parole sentences to restricting fines and fees. 

Under Republican Glenn Youngkin’s tenure as governor, starting in 2022, the state has gone the other way. Youngkin, who can’t seek reelection due to term limits, has dramatically rolled back voting rights restoration for Virginians who leave prison, largely shut down new reform legislation, and made the state’s parole system more punitive. Democratic U.S. Representative Abigail Spanberger and Republican Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears are facing off to replace him. 

Fatehi, now virtually certain to remain in office for another four years, says he’s eager to push Virginia lawmakers to revisit a reform agenda during that time. If Democrats retake full control of the state government, he says, “the Overton window dramatically shifts” for criminal justice reform, and he plans to make that case in Richmond. He says his “wish list” includes bills to repeal mandatory minimum sentences, end the use of cash bail, and bring back discretionary parole. 

Legislative Democrats are already planning to advance a constitutional amendment that would restore voting rights to formerly incarcerated Virginians. Glass, the state delegate, told Bolts she’ll reintroduce a bill she unsuccessfully championed last year to ban police from forging documents to use during interrogations. 

Many of those issues were part of the agenda pushed during Democrats’ last trifecta by the Virginia Progressive Prosecutors for Justice, a coalition of reform-minded commonwealth’s attorneys that formed in 2020 and then lobbied lawmakers in ensuing years. 

One of the prosecutors who played a leading role in forming that coalition, Portsmouth’s prosecutor Stephanie Morales, is also up for re-election this year. She faced no opponent in the Democratic primary last week, and she’ll be favored over two independent challengers in November’s general election as her city is staunchly blue.

Other prominent members of that alliance, Arlington County prosecutor Parisa Dehghani-Tafti and Fairfax County prosecutor Steve Descano, faced tough challenges when they last went up for reelection, in 2023, and they prevailed. Their Loudoun County colleague lost in the general election that fall, though. Dehghani-Tafti and Descano won’t be up again until 2027. 

Fatehi has been closely monitoring these other prosecutor races—not just in Virginia but in other parts of the country. His own victory comes just weeks after Larry Krasner, arguably the nation’s highest-profile reform prosecutor, easily prevailed in Philadelphia. It also comes on the heels of other recent wins for like-minded candidates, including in Minneapolis, Austin, Orlando, and suburban Colorado. Major reformers have been ousted by voters as well, most of them in California, in San Francisco in 2022, and Los Angeles and Oakland in 2024. 

To Fatehi, the results, when taken together, show that prosecutor candidates shouldn’t shy away from the “progressive” label and from proposing policies to reduce incarceration. He said, “We are very much alive and our voters very much want reform.”