June 25, 2021
Iranian-American Ramin Fatehi has easily won the Democratic nomination to be the state prosecutor in Norfolk, Virginia. The Republicans have not fielded a candidate and no one has filed to run as an independent, so Fatehi faces no opposition in the general election this November.
That will make him the second Iranian-American prosecutor in the state of Virginia. The other is Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, who was elected in Arlington in 2019.
Both come from a movement among lawyers to cease prosecuting minor offenders that is growing all across the country. They are usually called “progressives,” meaning they come from the left of the Democratic Party. They generally embrace the idea that structural racism has caused inequities that deny justice to minorities. They also oppose cash bail, which means the poor are more likely to be left in jail while awaiting trial.
In most cities in the US, these prosecutors are called district attorneys while in counties they are usually called state’s attorneys. In Virginia, they are called commonwealth’s attorneys. They prosecute violations of state laws, not federal laws; federal cases are prosecuted by US attorneys.
Fatehi, 42, won 61 percent of the vote in his race against two opponents, both women.
He was born in Suffolk, Virginia, not far from Norfolk, and moved to Tehran as an infant. His father was a neurosurgeon and his mother was a nurse. The family moved back to Virginia after the revolution when Ramin was seven.
Fatehi said, “I have lived a privileged life. But having to take up for my American mom in Iran and my Iranian dad in the States having been an insider and an outsider at the same time in one country and then the other taught me that we should never let our prejudice about people’s skin color, parents or background blind us to who they are as individuals.”
Fatehi got a BA in history from Yale and a law degree from Columbia Law School. He lives in Norfolk with his wife, Mary Beth, a lecturer at Old Dominion University, and their two sons, Thomas, 4, and James, 3.
