Local authorities in Virginia are concerned after George Soros-funded prosecutors let a registered sex offender and serial thief walk with almost no jail time. Karim Clayton, 44, has a lengthy criminal record that includes threatening a CVS clerk with a knife and leading cops on a high-speed chase through a major thoroughfare.
Fairfax County prosecutor Steve Descano and Arlington County prosecutor Parisa Dehghani-Tafti received six-figure contributions from Soros and easily won their seats. Both have also filed charges against Clayton at least a dozen times, only to drop them or plead him out on minor misdemeanors with little to no jail time.
The Washington Free Beacon reports Clayton served only three months behind bars following back-to-back arrests in the last week of September. According to Virginia court records, he was arrested for assault and battery on September 26 in Fairfax County.
He was freed on bond and arrested in Arlington County the next day for stealing from a CVS. Clayton was sentenced to 12 months in jail after Dehghani-office Tafti’s negotiated him down to a misdemeanor for the CVS robbery. However, he can serve nine of those months on probation, resulting in a total of only 90 days in jail.
Additionally, in June 2020, Clayton robbed a CVS in Chantilly, Virginia. He escaped in a 2016 Dodge Journey and led officers on a high-speed chase at more than 100 miles per hour that ended when he crashed near Arlington.
In September 2020, Clayton was charged with felony eluding and disregarding police, which was reduced to a misdemeanor by Descano’s office. He was sentenced to 180 days in jail, with the possibility of serving up to 170 days on probation. Dehghani-Tafti’s office charged him with felony assault on law enforcement for the same incident, but the case was dropped shortly after.
On top of his CVS robberies in Virginia, Clayton is a registered sex offender in Washington, D.C., following a 2015 conviction for child abuse. According to a home address on a sex offender register, he lives a third of a mile away from an elementary school. He’s also been charged with DUI and tampering with a GPS ankle monitor he was ordered to wear as a condition of parole.
Sean Kennedy, president of Virginians for Safe Communities, said, “Radical leftist prosecutors like Steve Descano and Parisa Dehghani-Tafti do not represent the public or crime victims. Their allegiances lie with criminal defendants first, last, and always.”
Zack Smith, a legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former federal prosecutor, stated, “I suspect a large number of crimes simply aren’t being captured because police aren’t going to make arrests. They’re not going to waste their limited resources arresting someone for a crime they know the prosecutor won’t prosecute, and where they know the person will be released from jail almost instantaneously.”
