It’s encouraging to see a “Soros DA” get her comeuppance, especially when it’s for malicious prosecution of parents who assert their rights. It happened earlier this month in Loudoun County, Virginia, but it doesn’t happen often enough.
All across the county, district attorneys elected with major financial support from leftist billionaire George Soros have been trying avidly to empty out prisons and arrange slap-on-the-wrist sentences for violent career criminals. What’s funny is that these prosecutors become strangely aggressive when faced with certain cases — for example, law-abiding citizens who kill in self-defense and those who can be made an example of to advance other leftist political ends.
This happened in a now-famous case in Loudoun County, where Commonwealth’s Attorney Buta Biberaj, one of Soros’s chosen officeholders, has been lenient on a “gender-fluid” student who committed sexual assault in a school bathroom. But Biberaj has insisted on prosecuting the victim’s father for “disorderly conduct” for daring to criticize the school board’s cover-up of the incident.
The father, Scott Smith, was furious when school board members lied, denying that any sexual assaults had occurred, even after his daughter was attacked by a boy wearing girls clothes in the girls bathroom. When the superintendent of schools illegally tried to shut down the meeting, Smith wouldn’t leave and was arrested. The case made national news as part of the debate about transgender-related policies.
The school system merely transferred the attacker to another school, where he committed another sexual offense. Still, he was sentenced to less than three years in a treatment facility. The judge also said he would make the boy register as a sex offender, but Biberaj failed to file the necessary paperwork, so the perpetrator is on no watch list.
Smith, on the other hand, was convicted of disorderly conduct and sentenced to 10 days in jail — a sentence the judge suspended but that remains on Smith’s record as a criminal conviction. Biberaj usually lets assistant prosecutors handle low-level charges like Smith’s, but she has insisted on personally prosecuting Smith’s case and pushed hard for him to actually serve jail time. Leftists apparently cannot bear the ideas that parents can dare question school officials and that anyone can challenge so-called transgender rights.
Smith is appealing his conviction, and Biberaj was insisting on personally carrying the case against his appeal. At the same time, she was on a Facebook group siding with the school board against parents like Smith.
“It was very clear she was trying to make an example of me, of what a parent shouldn’t do at a school board meeting,” Smith told us.
To most reasonable observers, Biberaj’s fevered obsession with punishing Smith seems not like justifiable prosecution but persecution. That’s pretty close to what Virginia Circuit Judge James F. Plowman thought as well. In reply to a motion by Smith’s attorneys to remove Biberaj from the case, Plowman agreed. “The concerns about public confidence in the integrity of the prosecution,” he wrote, “as well as the defendant’s concerns regarding the impartiality of the Commonwealth’s Attorney are sufficiently grounded.” Plowman removed Biberaj from Smith’s case and appointed a neighboring county prosecutor to decide whether to prosecute it further.
Plowman’s order is a stinging but well-aimed rebuke of Biberaj. Reasonable people, meanwhile, should hope Smith gets his record cleared.
The larger problem with Biberaj and Soros prosecutors in general, though, is not that they selectively prosecute political opponents but that they do so little prosecuting of real, dangerous criminals — and when they do, they seek barely any punishment. Again and again, criminals released back on the streets at the behest of Soros DAs have committed other violent crimes. And surely it is no coincidence that the sudden spike in violent crime in the past few years, after decades of decline, coincided with the election of so many soft-on-crime prosecutors whose campaigns were financed by Soros.
Multiple-incident sex offenders like the one who assaulted Smith’s daughter should be on a permanent list so neighbors can be forewarned. When prosecutors like Biberaj fail to do this, they bear at least some moral culpability for when these criminals re-offend. Such things wouldn’t happen if they stopped persecuting parents and started prosecuting dangerous criminals to the full extent of the law.
