This piece is part of MI x DW, a collaboration that brings Daily Wire readers exclusive commentary and research from the Manhattan Institute’s world-class team of scholars.

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Virginia’s top Democrats are outraged. Why? Because 13 Republican commonwealth’s attorneys (so far) have announced that they will not enforce the state’s new assault-weapons ban when it takes effect July 1, arguing that the law is unconstitutional.

Governor Abigail Spanberger’s office rebuked them: “The people of Virginia must be able to trust that all the commonwealth’s attorneys will uphold the rule of law and keep Virginians safe.” State Attorney General Jay Jones echoed her, saying, “Commonwealth’s Attorneys are elected to enforce our laws, which is what we expect them to do.”

Prosecutors picking and choosing which laws to enforce is a dereliction of duty that undermines the rule of law and endangers the public. Prosecutors do not get to veto gun laws any more than they get to veto theft, sentencing, immigration, or drug laws. Virginia’s new assault-weapons ban may well be unconstitutional, but that question belongs to judges or voters, not prosecutors acting as one-man legislatures.

But why did it take so long for Virginia Democrats to discover that premise? When progressive prosecutors nullified criminal laws governing theft, bail, sentencing, immigration cooperation, and drugs, Democrats called it principled and just. Now that conservatives apply that same theory to policies Democrats favor, it is an assault on the rule of law.

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Jones was silent when his political ally and campaign co-chair, Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano, nullified duly enacted Virginia laws. In 2020, Descano stopped prosecuting marijuana possession, unilaterally raised the felony-theft threshold above what state law prescribes, and prohibited all communication with immigration enforcement. He also barred prosecutors from seeking mandatory life sentences and directed line prosecutors to “make plea offers that avoid the legislatively mandated minimum jail sentence.”

Descano even campaigned on refusing to enforce laws he opposed. In a 2022 New York Times op-ed, he boasted that he would flout an abortion law if one were enacted.

Progressive criminal-justice groups call such unilateral actions “prosecutor-led” reform. In reality, it is lawmaking by prosecutorial fiat.

Nor is Fairfax unique. Across Virginia, a number of Democratic commonwealth’s attorneys — including Arlington’s Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, Portsmouth’s Stephanie Morales, Norfolk’s Ramin Fatehi, and Loudoun’s now-defeated Buta Biberaj — adopted similar nullification policies.

When progressive commonwealth’s attorneys announced these agendas, prominent Virginia Democrats did not denounce them. In fact, most cheered, because they opposed the laws the prosecutors were nullifying but lacked the votes to repeal them. Unable to enact their agenda legislatively, they backed extra-legal means to achieve their policy ends.

The consequences of prosecutorial nullification are not theoretical. In Fairfax, Descano’s office has repeatedly drawn judicial rebukes for trampling victims’ rights and has released dangerous offenders who went on to commit terrible crimes.

On February 23, Abdul Jalloh, an illegal immigrant, allegedly murdered Stephanie Minter at a bus stop. Jallo had more than 30 prior arrests and 40 charges, including multiple attempted-murder cases, for which he served little jail time. Yet despite repeated pleas from police, Descano’s office dropped case after case, and Jalloh was free months before Minter’s killing.

In responding to the Jalloh case, some of the loudest critics of Republican nonenforcement, including Governor Spanberger, chose misdirection. They blamed federal immigration authorities for releasing him five years earlier while ignoring the dozens of Fairfax cases that were dropped or minimized before the murder.

Descano and national Democrats insist Fairfax County remains a suburban idyll, calling it the “safest jurisdiction of its size in America.” But compared with jurisdictions closer in size or demographics, Fairfax looks worse.

In 2018, neighboring Montgomery County, Maryland, was roughly twice as violent as Fairfax. Last year, Montgomery recorded fewer crimes against persons and fewer property crimes than Fairfax. Suffolk County, New York, is larger than Fairfax, with about 1.5 million residents, yet its violent crime is lower and falling.

Fairfax is also trending in the wrong direction. According to Fairfax County Police data, crimes against persons — including murders, assaults, and sex offenses — were up 28 percent in 2025 from 2019, the year before Descano took office. They dipped only slightly from the 2024 high, even as crime has plummeted elsewhere.

State Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell of Fairfax, the gun-control measure’s chief sponsor, tried to call out conservative hypocrisy: “It was only a few years ago that many [of] the conservatives in the Commonwealth like the Attorney General [Jason Miyares] were complaining about Northern Virginia prosecutors not enforcing the laws on the books.”

Surovell is right about that. Our system requires prosecutors to enforce the law, not make it. If they want to legislate, they should win election to the General Assembly.

But Virginia Democrats defended such prosecutorial nullification until the other side adopted it. They are now reaping the whirlwind. Maybe this will remind them to put principle and public safety over politics.

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This is republished with permission from the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. The original can be found here.

Sean Kennedy is the president of Virginians for Safe Communities, a public safety and victims’ rights advocacy group based in Fairfax County, Virginia and member of the Fairfax County Criminal Justice Advisory Board.

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