Top Prosecutors In Arlington Question Candidate Josh Katcher's Commitment To Reform

ARLINGTON, VA — In the heated Democratic primary contest for commonwealth's attorney for Arlington and Falls Church, former prosecutor Josh Katcher has accused incumbent Parisa Dehghani-Tafti of mismanaging the office, leading to the departure of many attorneys and creating an environment where the office is falling short of implementing her criminal justice reform agenda.

But top prosecutors who work in Dehghani-Tafti's office contend she has assembled a strong group of attorneys who are turning Arlington into a model for what reform prosecution should look like.

"Over the course of these last three-and-a-half years, we have put together a good team that we are building and expanding on," Jeff Overand, chief deputy commonwealth’s attorney for Arlington and Falls Church, said in an interview with Patch.

Nassir Aboreden, deputy commonwealth’s attorney in charge of the special victims unit, told Patch that he believes the office has made major progress since Dehghani-Tafti took office in January 2020.

"The team we have now are people who really care about the mission, really care about the community, and they're people who are really good at their jobs," said Aboreden, who previously worked in a more traditional prosecutor's office in Loudoun County.

"I worked in Loudoun County for three years," he said about his time in the Loudoun County Commonwealth's Attorney Office from 2017 to 2020. "It was not a reform office at all. It was a traditional tough-on-crime prosecution office. That’s why I came here to work with Parisa."

READ ALSO: Arlington Commonwealth's Attorney Race Centers On Type Of Reformer

As for turnover in the office, Aboreden said there have been attorneys "who haven’t been on board" with Dehghani-Tafti's reform agenda. "And that's okay. That’s normal when you try to shake up a system as much as we have," he said.

Katcher, who worked under Dehghani-Tafti as a deputy commonwealth's attorney before resigning in August 2022, is campaigning on the slogan of “real reform and real justice.”

Katcher said he worries that reform prosecutors are being caricatured by Republicans as caring only about leniency for criminal suspects. The criminal justice reform movement may lose its momentum in a few years, he warned, if the debate continues to focus on who is tough on crime and who is soft on crime.

Four years ago, Dehghani-Tafti defeated former Commonwealth's Attorney Theo Stamos in the Democratic primary and then won the general election in the fall of 2019 as part of a wave of reform prosecutors taking office in Virginia and across the nation.

Prior to her election, Dehghani-Tafti worked as a public defender and as an attorney for the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project.

Second Generation

Among three reform prosecutors from Northern Virginia elected to office in 2019, Dehghani-Tafti is the only one who received an endorsement from The Washington Post for re-election in the Democratic primaries. In the re-election bids of reform prosecutors Steve Descano of Fairfax County and Buta Biberaj of Loudoun County, The Washington Post endorsed their opponents in the Democratic primary for commonwealth's attorney.

"Mr. Katcher calls himself a second-generation reformer with more practical prosecutorial experience who can fill vacancies in the office and improve data transparency," the Post wrote in its recent endorsement of Dehghani-Tafti. "But what Ms. Dehghani-Tafti has started is bearing fruit, and there’s no need to go back to the drawing board."

Brandon Sloane, who served as a deputy commonwealth’s attorney under Dehghani-Tafti for almost two years, said he does not expect Arlington will turn back the clock on its criminal justice reform efforts if Katcher is elected as the new commonwealth's attorney. The electorate in Arlington is too informed and too invested in reform to make a U-turn on the policies that Dehghani-Tafti has implemented, he said.

"But there might be an interesting conversation to be had about what the next phase of this looks like in terms of reform prosecution, and I think that's really at the core of the choice in this election," said Sloane, who joined the Fairfax office of criminal defense firm Dennis, Stewart & Krischer as a partner in 2022 after leaving the commonwealth's attorney office.

Sloane said he finds the Democratic primary in Arlington fascinating because there is a real question to be asked about how reform prosecution can be done better in Arlington.

"Maybe it needs the experienced hands to do it rather than the political class," he said. "Parisa, Steve [Descano], these guys were sort of handpicked to run and break the system and now that it is broken, are they the ones to put it back? That's the question."

Heather Keppler, an Arlington resident who volunteered for Dehghani-Tafti's campaign in 2019 but is volunteering for Katcher this year, said she is concerned about the lack of prosecution of certain cases by the commonwealth's attorney office under Dehghani-Tafti.

"My daughter was hit by a car while riding her bike and all charges were dropped against the guy who hit her, and we were not even contacted or informed by anyone from her office when it happened," Keppler told Patch.

In April, the mother of an Arlington teenager killed by a drunk driver urged local officials to rescind their endorsements of Dehghani-Tafti for re-election. Rose Kehoe, the mother of Braylon Meade, a 17-year-old student at Washington-Liberty High School who was killed in the crash last November, is upset that Dehghani-Tafti did not agree to try the driver, also a 17-year-old, as an adult.

In a letter to state Sen. Barbara Favola (D-Arlington), who endorsed Dehghani-Tafti for re-election, Kehoe argued that the driver’s “egregious conduct, combined with his age at the time of the crime,” warranted trying him as an adult, which would have allowed him to be tried for aggravated involuntary manslaughter.

Positive Trajectory

Brad Haywood, who serves as chief public defender in the Office of the Public Defender for Arlington and Falls Church, said he believes the Democratic primary for commonwealth's attorney is about "continuing the positive trajectory" started by Dehghani-Tafti.

"Parisa is doing it the right way," Haywood told Patch. "I think Arlington has the potential to be a template or a paragon for reform-oriented prosecution elsewhere."

Haywood said that picking Overand as the office's chief deputy commonwealth's attorney was a smart move by Dehghani-Tafti because he is well-liked, complements her leadership style and has the courage of his convictions.

"I feel like she's in the best shape she has been in terms of her office leadership," he said. "And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the office staffing situation has stabilized considerably since Josh left, whether that was just because of him or whether the dysfunction between them."

In their observations of the campaign for commonwealth's attorney, Overand and Aboreden, who both worked with Katcher, said they don't understand how he can brand himself as a reform prosecutor.

"He spent almost a decade in an office that was the most regressive office in Virginia," Aboreden said about Katcher's time as a prosecutor under Stamos, who after leaving office in January 2020 went to work in the U.S. Department of Justice, under then-President Donald Trump, and now works as a special counsel to Jason Miyares, Virginia's Republican attorney general.

When contacted for comment, Katcher said the claims about his reform credentials are "another desperate attempt by Ms. Tafti and her supporters to distract from the issues and her record."

"When it comes to the turnover in her office, the lack of crime data, or the botched cases, Ms. Tafti seems to be willing to blame everyone but herself," Katcher said. "As Commonwealth's Attorney, I won't be passing the blame around. The buck will stop with me."

Both Overand and Aboreden said they were not encouraged by Dehghani-Tafti to speak with Patch about their experiences in her office.

Overand said he would have more respect for Katcher if he had decided to run a campaign where he argued criminal justice reform does not work.

"Because then the people of Arlington would actually get to make a decision based on what the two people actually believe — criminal justice reform or not," he said. "For him to say he’s real reform, it’s infuriating."

READ ALSO: Arlington Candidates Debate Prosecution Of Teen In Braylon Meade Case

"If Josh really believed in reform, he would still be in the office with us working for the person who brought reform to the table in Arlington," Overand added.

Haywood recalled that Katcher, when he was in the commonwealth's attorney office, stepped in and took the side of one of Haywood's clients, arguing in court that he did not think the client had violated probation.

"That was a stand-up thing to do," Haywood said.

And when they spoke after Katcher launched his campaign, Haywood said Katcher told him that he wanted to keep the commonwealth's attorney office on the same trajectory started by Dehghani-Tafti but do it more competently.

But then Haywood said he noticed the names of certain former prosecutors and police officers as donors on Katcher's first campaign finance report released in January. The donors clearly were not supportive of criminal justice reform, he stated.

"He’s trying to lead people to believe that he’s somebody he is not," he said. "People are already so ignorant about criminal justice reform, especially in this community. When you have a campaign that is trafficking in misinformation and hoping that people will decide the future of the criminal courts based on that misinformation, I consider that a huge problem."

Soft Target

In the campaign, Katcher has argued that Arlington's reputation has changed since Dehghani-Tafti took over as commonwealth’s attorney and the county is now viewed as a "soft target" by people who live in neighboring jurisdictions and believe they can come to Arlington to commit crimes and not suffer any consequences.

He also accuses Dehghani-Tafti of creating a poor working relationship with the Arlington County Police Department.

Aboreden said the Arlington commonwealth’s attorney office has secured lengthy sentences on every carjacking case since he joined the office in 2020. “The idea that we don’t prosecute cases would be a surprise if you asked any member of the criminal defense bar in Arlington,” he said.

The office cannot do its job without working with the Arlington County Police Department. "I work on the most serious cases — crimes against children and sex crimes. I have a very good relationship with detectives in that unit," he said. "The police are a central partner."

Under Dehghani-Tafti, attorneys also are not using mandatory minimum laws for certain crimes to coerce plea agreements, according to Aboreden.

"If we’re not leveraging mandatory minimums, cases are going to trial a lot more often," he said. "We believe that the jurors of Arlington should decide whether someone is guilty or not. If we have a case that we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt, we have no issue going to trial. But that’s going to take time and manpower."

Haywood, who focuses on serious violent felonies in his role as head of Arlington's public defender's office, said one area where he has been unhappy with Dehghani-Tafti's tenure is how hard her office has prosecuted certain cases.

Over a 12-month period toward the end of 2022, Dehghani-Tafti's office had secured five life sentences. “There’s a narrative that she’s soft on crime. But she’s getting more life sentences than Theo Stamos’s office did," he said.

According to Haywood, where Dehghani-Tafti's office has been better than Stamos is how it handles the issue of serious mental illness. "They’ve been much better about diversion programming, alternatives to incarceration and treatment," he said.

While he considers Katcher a talented prosecutor, Overand said he and Katcher view the role of a prosecutor in completely different ways.

"I’m the type of prosecutor that if I get a life sentence for somebody, it’s something I do with some reluctance," he said. "I’m willing to do it because I understand that the role I play in the system is to ensure the safety of the community, the community where I live and am raising my family. I don’t get joy out of seeing another human being put in a cage for the rest of their lives."