Our under-incarceration problem, Northern Virginia edition

Last week, Karim Clayton was arrested by the Fairfax County, Virginia police for assault and battery. The police held him on $2,000 bond.

The next day, Clayton posted bail and was released. The day after that, he was arrested for trying to steal electronic equipment from a store in Arlington County, Virginia.

A tipster has described Clayton as “a one-man petty crime wave.” That, he is, but not all of his crimes are petty. According to Arlington Now:

He was found guilty of petit larceny on June 8, 2020, according to the Fairfax County Police Department, just three days before he robbed a CVS in the Fair Oaks section of Fairfax County and led Virginia State Police on a high-speed chase through part of Arlington.

On June 11, Clayton attempted to elude police and during his flight from police, he hit a parked car and kept driving, FCPD said. State troopers pursued on I-66 him until he crashed near N. Ohio Street in Arlington.

Clayton was charged with grand larceny, larceny with intent to sell or distribute, speeding to elude law enforcement, a hit and run and driving without a license.

He was only prosecuted in Arlington on the charges of eluding police, and sentenced to 180 days in prison with 171 days suspended, according to court records. His license was suspended for 30 days and he was fined $572. The fine is now past due, along with three others levied in Arlington General District Court over the past year or so, records show.

Between then and his alleged attempted robbery on Tuesday, he’s been charged with five counts of grand and petit larceny.

He has been found guilty three times so far, with one case pending. In those cases, he was sentenced to two 180-day stretches in prison, each with 135 days suspended, and one 90-day sentence fully suspended.

(Emphasis added)

Believe it or not, this understates the extent of Clayton’s criminality. A review of Virginia court records shows that since June 8, 2020, he has been charged two dozen times. Eighteen of the cases were dismissed and two are pending. Four resulted in guilty pleas or findings of guilt.

Clayton also has a criminal record in Washington, D.C. Charges there include theft, assault, and sexual assault. He is a registered sex offender in D.C.

Clayton is required by a D.C. court to wear an ankle monitor. In 2020, he was caught tampering with it. He is now considered a fugitive from the District.

The two Soros-backed Northern Virginia prosecutors — Parisa Dehghani-Tafti in Arlington County and Steve Descano in Fairfax County — or their offices surely know of Clayton’s record. It’s all there in court documents.

Yet, they continue to let this incorrigible criminal loose, enabling him to continue his one-man crime wave.

We shouldn’t be surprised. Dehghani-Tafti and Descano don’t believe in holding criminals in jail. Both oppose cash bail and have stopped using it in most cases. They share George Soros’ view that criminals are victims of an unjust, racist society. That’s why Soros backs them.

The Democrat-controlled Virginia legislature has chipped in by removing the rebuttable presumption that defendants charged with certain crimes — from murder, robbery and aggravated assaults to many involving domestic assaults, guns and drugs — don’t qualify for bail release.

In Clayton’s most recent case, bail was set at only $2,000. Thus, he was able to rob a store just one day after being arrested for assault.

Only prosecutors ideologically indifferent to crime would allow someone like Clayton to pass in and out of their counties’ jails this way.

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