Virginia's culture warrior attorney general

How Jason Miyares turned an office for the wrongly convicted into a MAGA propaganda mill

(Jason Miyares. Photo by Julia Rendleman for The Washington Post, via Getty Images)

Jason Miyares made his priorities clear the moment he took office. Shortly after the Virginia Republican was sworn in as the state’s new attorney general in 2022, he abruptly fired everyone in the conviction integrity unit (CIU), the office charged with investigating and rectifying wrongful convictions.

“It was certainly a surprise,” says Emilee Housbrouck, one of the fired attorneys. “Two people on our team didn’t get the email. One came to the building to discover he’d been locked out when his credentials no longer worked. Another got trapped in the parking garage.”

Miyares fired 17 attorneys and 30 total employees, including many attorneys in the civil rights division, as well as the general counsel for the University of Virginia — who at the time had taken leave to serve as lead investigator for the special congressional committee investigating January 6th. Miyares insisted the attorney’s termination had nothing to do with his work on the attempted insurrection.

Miyares was elected in 2021 on the Republican ticket led by Gov. Glenn Youngkin. It was the first major victory for Virginia Republicans in the Trump era, and the election was portrayed in national media as a possible GOP resurgence in a bluing state.

Two years later, it seems clear that Youngkin’s election was driven mostly by voter apathy for his Democratic opponent — former governor and longtime Clinton associate Terry McCauliffe — than any major shift in the electorate. Youngkin won by just 1.9 percent. Since then, Virginia Republicans have not only failed to retake the state senate as Youngkin had hoped, they lost control of the state’s House of Delegates in November.

Both Youngkin and Miyares campaigned on a Fox News-friendly platform — crime, anti-woke-ism, anti-elitism, and anti-trans rhetoric. They attacked criminal justice reforms, public school officials, immigration, and “Soros-funded prosecutors.” Both collected a long list of endorsements from police groups, sheriffs, and prosecutors.

In the end, Miyares beat incumbent Attorney General Mark Herring by 0.8 percent, less than half of Youngkin’s already narrow margin. Yet Miyares seized power as if he’d been handed a sweeping mandate. After firing the 30 employees, he proclaimed “there’s a new sheriff in town,” a swaggering bit of pomposity quickly lapped up by conservative media outlets. Since taking office, Miyares has hit all the hot-button culture war issues, from banning TikTok, to hostility to migrants and trans students, to COVID, to declaring fentanyl a “weapon of terrorism.”

But at risk of stating the obvious, there’s nothing “law and order” about remaining willfully ignorant of wrongful convictions. Leaving people in prison for crimes they didn’t commit is not only unjust and unfair, it’s an assault on the rule of law. It often also means perpetrators go unpunished — or remain free to commit other crimes.

Miyares never gave a reason for disbanding the CIU, probably because there isn’t a very good one. It couldn’t have been for fiscal reasons. With five full-time employees, the office comprised a tiny portion of the AG’s $70 million annual budget. And as we’ll see, Miyares has spent far more public resources on grievance-driven investigations that have done a lot to raise his national profile but little to improve public safety.

It also couldn’t have been because of poor performance. His predecessor announced the new office in January 2021, and it wasn’t fully staffed until the following April. So it was only fully operational for eight months. In that time, the three attorneys, one investigator, and one paralegal discovered, investigated, and had begun working to overturn four wrongful convictions. The unit also solicited and compiled a long waitlist of cases in need of investigation. It isn’t clear what happened to that list after Miyares dissolved the office.

“I think he did it because he has a simplistic, binary view of the justice system,” one public defender told me. “He just thinks more people behind bars is good, and fewer people behind bars is bad.”

Virginia’s red flags

Conviction Integrity Units — sometimes called Conviction Review Units — have proliferated in the wake of exonerations won by DNA testing. One of the first — and perhaps most famous — was set up by Craig Watkins in Dallas County, Texas, also one of the first reformist prosecutors to win office in a large city.

Watkins’s CIU began turning up an alarming number of wrongful convictions. That generated positive media coverage. And soon enough, CIUs began to spring up in DA offices around the country. At their best, these units tend to be overworked, understaffed offices in which a handful of attorneys sort through impossibly long waitlists to investigate and rectify decades of wrongful convictions that would take hundreds of attorneys, investigators, and support staff to litigate properly. They’re often hamstrung by recalcitrant judges, restrictions barring them from looking into active cases, hostile colleagues in the rest of the DA’s office, and police and city officials worried about the civil liability and damages that tend to come with exonerations.

At their worst, CIUs are empty gestures to demonstrate a DA’s commitment to fairness and justice, but shy away from cases that would expose systemic or institutional problems.

In Virginia, the office of the attorney general handles and has final say over most appeals and post-conviction litigation. So while a locally elected Commonwealth’s Attorney (the state’s equivalent of a DA) could in theory set up a CIU, if the AG’s office doesn’t sign off on any wrongful convictions that unit might find, those cases aren’t likely to get much traction in the courts. When Miyares disbanded the AG’s CIU, he effectively ended any proactive effort by the state of Virginia to seek out wrongful convictions.

Virginia has seen 66 exonerations in the era of DNA testing. That list includes unfathomable miscarriages of justice, including the wrongful convictions of the Norfolk Four (a textbook example of police-coerced false confessions), and the imprisonment of Keith Harward, who was convicted with bitemark evidence — one of the more transparently ridiculous fields of dubious forensics. Harward spent 33 years in prison before DNA testing finally cleared him.

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It also seems safe to say that those 66 exonerations don’t begin to scratch the surface of wrongful convictions in the state. DNA testing has revealed that some problems show up over and over in wrongful convictions. And as red flags go, the Virginia system flaps like a Maoist May Day parade.

One red flag is a culture of aggressive and abusive prosecutors. In Virginia, funding for prosecutor offices is based on how many felony convictions they secure. The more convictions and sentences for serious crimes, the more money an office gets. It’s a funding structure that rewards shortcuts, aggression, and punitiveness.

Because prosecutor misconduct often goes unreported, it’s often difficult to assess just how common it is. But one pretty reliable indication of a toxic prosecutorial culture is a failure to punish even egregious misconduct. That’s a pretty good sign that a state doesn’t take such abuse seriously.

In Virginia we needn’t look further than Paul Ebert, the dean of Old Dominion prosecutors. Ebert was the Commonwealth’s Attorney in Prince William County for more than a half century, the longest tenure the state has ever seen. He also sent more people to death row than any prosecutor in state history, in a state that’s second only to Texas in executions.

In the horrendous case of Justin Wolfe, a federal appeals court declared itself “flabbergasted” that Ebert committed abuses “not only unconstitutional in regards to due process, but abhorrent to the judicial process.” Yet that still wasn’t enough to overturn Wolfe’s conviction, much less bring any serious sanctions upon Ebert.

Ebert also once tried to prosecute a 17-year-old boy of sex crimes for sending an explicit video to his 15-year-old girlfriend, an effort to ruin a kid’s life over an ill-advised but consensual act. Ebert was so eager to go after the boy that he and police obtained a warrant to photograph the boy’s erect penis. The state relented only after the case generated public outrage.

Ebert’s office was also found by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to have committed misconduct in the D.C. sniper case by withholding exculpatory evidence. “When questioned . . . why this information was withheld or why the Commonwealth did not take the step of instituting an open-file policy, the Commonwealth had no explanation,” the court wrote. That was a high-profile, fairly open-and-shut case — the sort of case where most prosecutors might be reluctant to cut corners, and wouldn’t need to.

Ebert was never disciplined for his conduct in any of these cases. Instead, he retired in 2019 to praise and acclaim for his public service, along with an honorary portrait in the county courthouse.

Another frequent contributor to wrongful convictions is an inadequate indigent defense system. Virginia’s system has been underfunded and overworked for decades. It remains in perpetual crisis today, particularly in rural parts of the state.

About one in five wrongful convictions involve unscientific forensic testimony. Here too, Virginia’s history is as sordid as anywhere in the country. Over the last 20 years, journalists and defense investigators have revealed that analysts in the state crime lab had been faking forensic evidence for decades — not mistakenly providing expertise unsupported by science but knowingly faking results. (For more on this incredible story, I recommend the terrific podcast Admissible.)

Even after these revelations, the state mustered only a bare bones review of cases that had already been exposed. Virginia officials made little effort to assess the extent of the damage, or to look for other possible wrongful convictions that had yet to be discovered.

All of which is to say that when Mark Herring established the Conviction Integrity Unit in 2021, it was long overdue. And the new staff had barely scratched the surface of the state’s likely glut of wrongful convictions before Miyares sent them packing.

Abandoning the innocent

When Miyares announced his dissolution of the unit, he deflected criticism by also promising to “expand” it. But that isn’t what he did.

Instead, Miyares created a new office called the “Cold Cases, Actual Innocence and Special Investigations Unit.” So instead of an office solely dedicated to seeking out wrongful convictions, the state now has an office that theoretically does that, but also does a variety of other things. And as it turns out, the most ambiguous of the new office’s responsibilities — “special investigations” — appears to be its top priority.

The first sign of Miyares’s misdirection was his curious choice to lead the new office — former Arlington County Commonwealth’s Attorney Theo Stamos.

(Note: I sent a list of questions to both Stamos and Miyares. Stamos replied that she had forwarded my email to communications director Victoria LaCivita. I never heard back from LaCivita.)

The AG’s office regularly emphasizes that Stamos is a “Democrat,” but there’s some important context here, too. In her 2019 reelection bid, Stamos lost in the primary to a then-defense attorney who criticized the incumbent for, among other things, aggressive prosecutions of children and an unwillingness to hold abusive police officers accountable.

After her defeat, Stamos joined Donald Trump’s Presidential Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, and was even photographed attending a White House ceremony announcing the commission.

The commission, headed by former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr, was widely criticized as a law enforcement mouthpiece thinly disguised as a reform body. Its work would later be temporarily halted by a federal judge for violating guidelines requiring such commissions to be transparent and include input from all stakeholders. “The commission’s membership consists entirely of current and former law enforcement officials,” the judge wrote. “No commissioner has a criminal defense, civil rights or community organization background.” Two members of the commission — both district attorneys — later resigned because of what they described as the panel’s lack of transparency and pro-law enforcement bias.

I spoke to several attorneys who do innocence work in Virginia. And while Miyares’s new office has supported exoneration in two of the four holdover cases from his predecessor, the main task of a CIU is to proactively investigate and work to correct wrongful convictions. And there’s little evidence they’re doing that.

“If they were doing any proactive investigations that led to litigation, I’m not aware of them,” one innocence attorney in the state told me. “And we track those things. I just don’t think Miyares and Stamos think there are very many innocent people in prison.”

Prior to Miyares, attorneys from the CIU regularly met once a month with representatives from the Innocence Project at the University of Virginia to discuss cases where they might collaborate. According to multiple sources, those meetings stopped once Miyares took over.

Miyares’s office also appears to have adopted a particularly punitive interpretation of some language Virginia includes in conditional pardons. Under this sort of pardon, the governor can shorten or modify a prisoner’s sentence, but the pardon doesn’t necessarily clear the prisoner’s record.

In Virginia, conditions pardons include boilerplate language stating that by accepting the pardon, the prisoner agrees not to sue the state for civil damages.

“Miyares’s office recently argued in a case that this language also prevents the recipient from later filing for a writ of innocence,” says Housbrouck. This is a significant change from how that language has been interpreted in the past.

“It’s really concerning,” Housbrouck says. “It has never been interpreted that way, and the previous administration that issued those pardons has said it shouldn’t be interpreted that way. People who have been wrongly convicted are obviously desperately to get out of prison. This would mean that in order to get out, they’d have to forego any chance of later clearing their name. ”

Innocence litigation often uncovers patterns of misconduct and institutional failures, and those discoveries often lead to more exonerations. To give one example, state officials are now investigating other possible wrongful convictions caused by the police detective who extracted false confessions from the Norfolk Four. A conditional pardon in a similar case in the future could, as interpreted by Miyares’s office, limit the kind of defense litigation that exposed that misconduct.

An abrupt reversal

Not surprisingly, upon taking office, Miyares quickly withdrew and reversed his predecessor’s amicus briefs in pending cases covering a wide range of issues, from climate change to guns to abortion. In nearly all of those cases, the change in the state’s position was largely symbolic. But in the cases of Terrence Richardson and Ferrone Claiborne, the .08 percent margin that put Miyares in office was far more consequential.

In 1998, Richardson and Claiborne were arrested and charged for the murder of Allen Gibson, a police officer in the town of Waverly. According to investigators, Gibson was shot and killed with his own gun after he interrupted an illegal drug sale.

The state’s case against Richardson and Claiborne was based entirely on the testimony of eyewitnesses. Most of those eyewitnesses have since either recanted or been discredited. One witness was the sister of the most likely alternate suspect. And despite the state’s theory that whoever killed Gibson struggled with the officer and wrestled his own gun from him, there was no biological evidence linking Richardson or Claiborne to the crime — no fingerprints, no blood, no DNA.

Jarrett Adams is the lawyer for both men. Adams himself served 10 years for a crime for which he was later exonerated. In fact, that’s how he was introduced to the case. “Seven and a half years ago, the Virginia Sheriff’s Association invited to me talk about my own case,” he told me in a phone interview. “Afterward, a woman came up to me holding a manila envelope. I saw in her face these lines — what I’d call these wrinkles of anguish. Those lines were all too familiar to me. I’d seen them on my own mother while I was in prison. They’re the lines she earned from fighting for my vindication.”

The woman was Terrence Richardson’s mother. Adams took the file from her, read through it that night, and agreed to take the case. “I told her I’d investigate her son’s case. And I promised her I’d keep investigating until I found evidence that convinced me he was guilty,” he says.

“I’m still investigating.”

A conviction for killing a police officer in Virginia in the late 90’s could easily have brought a death sentence. But prosecutors eventually allowed Richardson to plead guilty to involuntarily manslaughter, and Claiborne to a misdemeanor charge of accessory after the fact. Those were aberrantly lenient charges for such a serious crime. They suggested that the state wasn’t all that confident in the evidence.

Both men accepted the offers, but both have since insisted that they’re innocent. “These men were accused of a crime that ripped through that community, and for which they could have been executed,” says Adams. “The state then lined up all of these so-called eyewitnesses to incriminate them. The writing was on the wall. Then, just as these men saw the state’s institutional might taking aim at them, they offered Richardson a deal that brought a five-year sentence. They offered Claiborne a charge that resulted in no jail time at all. I don’t care if you’re innocent. If you’re staring down a possible execution, you jump at those offers.”

But to many in Virginia, it looked as if two confessed cop killers had just been let off with a slap on the wrist. Police groups erupted; conservatives demagogued; editorial boards consternated.

Then federal prosecutors stepped in. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia indicted Richardson and Claiborne for selling narcotics and the specific federal crime of murdering a law enforcement officer while trafficking in illegal drugs.

The federal prosecutors were able to bring charges because of the “Dual Sovereignty Doctrine.” The Supreme Court has ruled that because state and federal governments are different entities, a suspect can be charged separately in state and federal court for the same criminal act without violating Fifth Amendment protections against Double Jeopardy.

The federal trial only confirmed what Virginia prosecutors seemed to reveal in their plea offer to the two men — evidence of their involvement in Gibson’s murder was weak. While the jury convicted both men of drug trafficking based on witnesses who claimed to have bought small amounts of crack from them, it acquitted them of murdering Gibson.

Then it all got very strange. Under current federal law, so long as you’ve been convicted on at least one charge, a judge can still sentence you for any or all of the crimes with which you have been charged, even if a jury specifically acquitted you of those crimes.

So that’s what the federal judge did — he sentenced Richardson and Claiborne to life in prison. The judge called the men’s guilty pleas in state court to far less serious charges “clear and convincing evidence” that they “killed [Gibson] . . . under circumstances that would constitute murder.” Richardson was effectively sentenced to life in prison for involuntarily manslaughter; Claiborne for a misdemeanor.

The two men now find themselves in a bewildering legal limbo. Even under normal circumstances, prisoners face long odds to get a court to reopen their cases once they’ve exhausted their appeals. They must successfully negotiate byzantine state procedures before a federal court will even consider the merits of their case. One misstep and the case can be thrown out on a technicality. It’s typically even tougher if the prisoner confessed or pleaded guilty.

But because the federal life sentences imposed on Richardson and Claiborne are based on guilty pleas in state court, the two men can’t challenge those sentences in federal court until they first get the guilty pleas overturned in state court. Claiborne can’t even do this — Virginia doesn’t allow prisoners to challenge misdemeanors in post-conviction. Richardson has to beat the long odds in state court before either he or Claiborne can file in federal court.

The men’s best hope was to get the state to support their writ of innocence. The courts are far more likely to grant such requests when the state doesn’t oppose them. So Adams set out to get the Virginia attorney general on his clients’ side.

Adams finally convinced Herring’s office to look into the convictions in early 2021, shortly after Gibson’s daughter asked that the case be reopened, citing the evidence Adams had collected.

The new CIU took on the cases, and after months of investigation, the state of Virginia finally submitted a brief recommending a writ of innocence for Richardson and Claiborne. Herring signed the brief. It was filed on the night before he lost his bid for reelection.

The following January, less than 30 days after taking office, Jason Miyares asked the court to disregard his predecessor’s brief. His office replaced it with a new brief arguing that the two men are guilty and should remain in prison.

“One attorney general spent eight months thoroughly investigating these cases,” Adams says. “His successor comes along and less than a month after taking office, he claims he’s already conducted his own investigation and he knows my clients are guilty. How? How much investigation could you have done? Come on. This is a guy who solicited support from police unions. Why wouldn’t you want to go after the man who really killed Officer Gibson? He’s using emotion and fear to feed his own political ambition. And my clients suffer for it.”

In June 2022, the Virginia Court of Appeals denied Richardson’s request to reopen his case. He had asked the court to consider previously unlitigated evidence, including an exculpatory statement from a separate eyewitness, the results of a photo lineup in which that eyewitness picked out an alternate suspect, and an anonymous tip to police identifying the same alternate suspect. The appeals court didn’t rule on the merits of this new evidence. Instead, it ruled that the evidence should have been discovered back when Richardson was charged. Because his attorney failed to do so, Richardson is now barred from using that evidence in their defense.

The Virginia Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal.

New priorities

So if Mirayes’s new, “expanded” version of the CIU isn’t looking for wrongful convictions, what exactly is it doing? The answer appears to be raising the attorney general’s profile by waging culture war battles.

One such battle that both Youngkin and Miyares mentioned often during their campaigns was the June 2021 arrest of Scott Smith after he scuffled with security officers during a Loudoun County school board meeting. Smith had every right to be angry. His daughter had been sexually assaulted by a classmate in the bathroom of her school. Her attacker would later be arrested for a second assault after he was transferred to another school while still under investigation.

The case became a right-wing sensation when Smith claimed the boy had only been able to access the girls’ bathroom because he identified as trans, was wearing a skirt, and the school had recently implemented a new trans-acceptance policy. According to this version of events, the school then quietly transferred the boy so as not to draw negative attention to its LGBTQ+ agenda.

It was a narrative that amplified a number of right-wing grievances. But that narrative eventually fell apart. The boy was not trans, and hadn’t posed as a girl in order to access the girl’s bathroom or to attack female students. He and his victim had met in the same bathroom for consensual sex on two prior occasions, and agreed to meet there again on the day in question. On this particular occasion, the girl told authorities, the boy she did not want to have sex, at which point he assaulted her.

That’s a horrendous experience for Smith’s daughter, but it had nothing to do with the school’s trans-inclusive policies, which hadn’t been implemented at the time. Moreover, the boy’s transfer to a second school, while an excusable mistake, appears to be more due to bureaucratic incompetence and an inability to prevent sexual assaults in general than a far-left agenda.

Smith has every right to be angry, of course, though officials say he was arrested not for criticizing the school board, but because he approached another parent with a closed fist. In August 2021, a jury convicted Smith of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. Youngkin then pardoned him in September.

Upon taking office, Miyares empaneled a grand jury to investigate how Loudoun County officials had handled the entire affair. The first criminal charge from that investigation was against a spokesman for Loudoun County Schools for lying to the grand jury. He was acquitted in June. The jury deliberated for just two hours. Theo Stamos lead that investigation.

The grand jury also indicted the former superintendent of the school system on a charge of “false publication” (basically criminal libel) for allegedly lying about the assaults during a school board meeting. Stamos headed up that investigation as well. Last month, Miyares announced that the state would be dropping that charge, too.

The superintendent was convicted in September on a charge of retaliating against a teacher, but that was unrelated to the assaults that made national news.

In the end, the top priority of the unit Miyares created to replace the CIU was a highly-publicized criminal investigation into a debunked culture war narrative that resulted in no criminal convictions. No matter. Last month, Miyares gave Stamos a promotion.

Miyares war on Virginia’s allegedly woke public schools didn’t end there. He also opened an investigation into Fairfax County schools for an apparent delay in notifying students winners of merit-based scholarships. Miyares alleges the school discriminated against white or Asian students by deliberately delaying notification so as not to offend black and Latino students who didn’t win.

Miyares has also continued to pressure the state’s public schools to comply with anti-trans policies pushed by the Youngkin administration, including requiring schools to report suspected trans or nonbinary students to their parents. He also sided with conservative parents in the ongoing fight over student access to LGTBQ+-related books.

To his credit, Miyares been a realist when it comes to 2020 election denial, conceding that Joe Biden was fairly elected — a position that puts him at odds with the vast majority of his party. But he has also used his office to feed broader, equally dubious, equally destructive claims about election fraud.

Just weeks into his term, Miyares’s office held a meeting with a Virginia state senator who’d been censured by her colleagues for her own baseless claims about the election and praise for January 6th rioters. At about the same time, one of Miyares’s top deputies — Monique Miles — had to resign after the Washington Post found Facebook posts in which she claimed there was overwhelming evidence that Donald Trump won the 2020 election. She also called the January 6th rioters “patriots,” and implored Trump supporters to “fight for our rights by any means necessary.” She would later blame the January 6th attacks on Antifa and Black Lives Matter.

Though Miyares’s administration distanced itself from Miles’s posts, several months later, in September 2022, he set up what he called an “election integrity unit” to ensure “legality and purity in elections.” There’s no credible evidence that Virginia’s election system has a problem with either. When the Virginia NAACP filed an open records request for emails and other documents related to the new office, Miyares’s office told them they’d have to pay $20,000 to obtain them.

Miyares’s use of the phrase “integrity unit” also seems like deliberate thumb in the eye to those who criticized him for disbanding the CIU. He coopted a term used by a tiny office created to combat a real problem for an enormous office he created to combat a problem that doesn’t exist.

What the new office did do was feed into Republican conspiricizing about election fraud that has become toxic in Virginia as in other places. Several elections officials around the state have resigned in recent years, citing an environment of bad faith, false accusation, and threats. The chief elections official in Prince William County quit last year, telling one local outlet, “When I get pissed off, I get pissed off. And I think this is bullshit. If I’m dead next year, I won’t be a very good registrar anyway.” In Buckingham County, four election officials quit after baseless allegations from Republicans, causing the county to struggle to count votes last November.

Miyares announced the new election fraud office — which includes over 20 investigators, attorneys, and support staff — just days after making yet another headline-grabbing announcement that he’d filed criminal charges against another elections official in Prince William County. Miyares’s office was opaque about the nature of those charges, but the evidence for them couldn’t have been very compelling. The the most serious were thrown out last month, and the remaining charge, “willful neglect of duty,” a misdemeanor, was dismissed this week.

Once again, Miyares launched an expensive criminal investigation with pomp and fanfare fit for cable news. And once again it went nowhere.

A flukey mandate

Miyares’s effort to project a tough-on-crime image hasn’t been limited to turning a blind eye to wrongful convictions. In the 2021 campaign, both he and Youngkin attacked McCauliffe for appointing what they said was an overly lenient state parole board during his previous term as governor. That board denied 94 percent of parole petitions.

Last year, Miyares’s office issued a scathing report on the parole board under Gov. Ralph Northam, accusing the then-chair of circumventing state protocols to release a record number of prisoners in 2020.

That board does appear to have skirted some rules and state procedures, and was then less than transparent about doing so. But there appears to have been quite a bit of political posturing and questionably legal leaks all around.

More importantly, the report casually dismisses some pretty important context: That all happened in 2020. It was in response to a once-in-a-generation pandemic, when jails and prisons had become enormous petri dishes for COVID.

Arlington public defender Brad Haywood posted two rebuttal threads to the report on X. “About 10 percent of the people released had problems with probation or parole violations,” Haywood told me in a phone interview. “I think two or three reoffended.”

In what’s now a familiar pattern, Miyares publicly accused the former parole board chair of actual crimes, but couldn’t back those accusations with a single conviction. This time, Miyares said he was barred from bringing charges by statutes of limitations.

Miyares attacked progressive prosecutors throughout his campaign, and continued those attacks after he was elected. After taking office, he pushed a bill that would have allowed his office to take over any local violent crime case at the request of a sheriff or police chief. An alternate version of the bill limited such cases to sex crimes involving children. Neither passed the legislature.

“Virginia Republicans have really leaned into the tough on crime stuff,” Haywood says. “But there isn’t much evidence that it’s working for them. If you look at the election last year, one of the only incumbent Democrats to lose was probably the most ‘tough on crime’ Democrat in the legislature.”

Meanwhile, Don Scott, the new speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates — and first black speaker in state history — is a walking counter-argument to the retributive anger driving Miyares’s and Youngkin’s hostility to reform. Scott once served seven years in federal prison on drug charges.

Still, Miyares recently told the Daily Mail that he’s optimistic about defeating “Soros-funded prosecutors,” citing a win by a Pennsylvania candidate Miyares had supported with his political action fund.

The progressive prosecutor in Loudoun County also lost her reelection bid last year. But as in other parts of the country, most progressive prosecutors in Virginia have fared well with voters. Of the 12 other members of Virginia Progressive Prosecutors for Justice, 10 won. The other incumbent member — the chief prosecutor in Norfolk — retired, but he was also replaced by a reformer.

As with other Republicans holding statewide offices in purple states, Miyares is imposing his own values on an electorate that doesn’t want them. Miyares supports the death penalty, 56 percent of Virginians supported its repeal. Miyares wants strict controls on abortion. Over 70 percent of Virginians disagree. Six in 10 Virginians support recreational marijuana. Miyares opposes it. Miyares opposes teaching the country’s history of racism in public schools; 63 percent of Virginians support it. And Miyares supports mandatory minimum sentences, while 55 percent of Virginians want to end them.

As attorney general, Miyares is on the short list of candidates expected to run for governor in 2025. But he seems less like a contender and more like a guy elected on a fluke in a state that has largely passed him by. The problem is that until voters get another chance to reject him, he can do a lot of damage.

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