Backed by two well-organized activist groups, residents of Loudoun County are moving ahead in their effort to recall Loudoun County Commonwealth’s Attorney Buta Biberaj.
Biberaj won election on an anti-incarceration platform. Despite that, she sought jail time for Scott Smith, a dad arrested at a Loudoun County School Board meeting out of frustration over the district (and county’s) perceived inability to punish the student who sexually assaulted his teenage daughter.
The Daily Wire reports:
Virginians for Safe Communities and Stand up Virginia are collecting signatures at a Loudoun forum tonight hosted by Patriot Pub Alliance. In addition to speakers from the two organizations, former GOP state Sen. Dick Black, as well as Scott Smith, the father of a rape victim at Stone Bridge High School, as reported by The Daily Wire, will talk.
“There have been significant recent developments so we revised our petition,” Sean Kennedy, president and founder of Virginians for Safe Communities, told The Daily Wire. “From failing to properly prosecute sex assault to allowing a domestic abuse murder to occur, there are many other problem. We have energetic volunteers. We now have momentum. We’re launching this because we’re combing forces and reinvigorating it.”
Bail reform, arguably the most controversial of Biberaji’s policies, led to the release of a Loudoun man awaiting trial for viciously assaulting his wife. While out on bail, he allegedly beat his estranged wife to death with a hammer, as the Loudoun Times-Mirror morbidly reported at the time:
Deputies responded to the apartment after receiving a 9-1-1 call from a male stating that he just killed his wife, the complaint reads.
After the couple exchanged words, the complaint said that Peter Lollobrigido later retrieved a hammer from under a sink, gave her a kiss, “looked her square in the eyes,” then said he loved her before striking her with the hammer. The defendant said he had no idea if his wife was still alive when he called 9-1-1.
To get Biberaj’s recall on the ballot, recall supporters must collect enough signatures to equate to at least 10% of people who voted in the last commonwealth’s attorney election.
In this instance, that means roughly 11,500 names.