Now THIS is how a governor should use their authority to pardon under state law.

Those who paid attention to the 2021 gubernatorial election in Virginia will remember that the reason that Glenn Youngkin was able to defeat former governor and Clinton syncophant Terry McAuliffe was because of angry parents who were fed up with the public schools. Parents were ready to leave COVID-era masking and craziness behind, but the teachers’ unions were not (and Terry McAuliffe had the nerve to campaign with Randi Weingarten, Lockdown Queen), and parents were infuriated at the woke social engineering that the schools were trying to shoehorn into lessons, and covering up for actual crimes happening because it wasn’t politically palatable for the district. The case that ended up getting the most attention in the last days of the gubernatorial election was the cover-up in the Loudoun County School District, where a girl was raped in a high school bathroom by a boy wearing a skirt, and the district attempted to cover it up, called the police on Scott Smith, the girl’s father, when he showed up at school to figure out what was going on, moved the rapist to a new high school, where he AGAIN assaulted an innocent girl. The offender is now locked up in residential treatment, the school board voted to fire the superintendent, and the superintendent and the district’s spokesman were both indicted for perjury (the spokesman was acquitted after a jury trial) after a grand jury report investigating the rapes and the cover-ups was released.

But because this is northern Virginia, and because rabid leftist Buta Biberaj still is the commonwealth’s attorney for Loudoun County, Scott Smith was charged for protesting at a school board meeting where the superintendent and the board outright lied about sexual assaults in schools. The board meeting was declared an “unlawful assembly” and Smith was arrested. Biberaj then went on to charge Scott Smith – whose daughter was the first rape victim – with “disorderly conduct.” And because this is northern Virginia, she got a misdemeanor conviction from a judge (no jury trial because it was a misdemeanor charge), which Smith appealed.

Smith in August 2021 was convicted in General District Court of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest and sentenced to 10 days in jail, all suspended contingent on a year of good behavior. Smith appealed, and the charge of resisting arrest was subsequently dismissed because of an error in paperwork.

… Smith’s attorney, William Stanley, who represents the 20th Senate District in the General Assembly, sought to have the disorderly conduct charge thrown out before the appeal is argued.

Stanley argued Smith’s actions leading up to his arrest no more tended to violence than many other people’s behavior at that raucous meeting, and so did not meet the legal standard for disorderly conduct.Stanley pointed to testimony that the woman with whom Smith argued approached him first, calling his daughter a liar and threatening to ruin his business. Smith leaned toward the woman, clenching one fist at his side, and called her an expletive.

Stanley said that amounted to protected free speech.

“While Smith was at an intense School Board meeting that was discussing a policy issue that had a direct impact on the School Board policy that caused the harm to his daughter, he was no agitator, but rather he was only responding to a provocateur who was saying horrible things to him about his family,” Stanley’s motion argues.

And because this is northern Virginia, the judge had to put his two cents’ worth in as well.

Judge James Howe Brown denied that motion, sending the appeal to trial set for Sept. 25. Smith has requested a jury trial.

“I think he’s lucky he didn’t get slapped, never mind arrested,” Brown said.

“The problem with our justice system across our land is it’s no longer fair. It’s not fair,” Smith said after the hearing. “I’ll keep fighting this and I will win. But in the meantime, it’s just more pain on me and my family. It just holds back our healing, it’s ridiculous, our governor needs to step up and do something.”

“How the f— does a judge say I deserve to be slapped?” he added.

Well, today, Governor Glenn Youngkin did indeed “step up and do something” before the appeal went before a jury trial in two weeks. During an interview this morning with Fox News’ Shannon Bream, Youngkin announced that he had pardoned Scott Smith (comments begin at 7:46).

“I spoke with Mr. Smith on Friday, and I had the privilege of telling Mr. Smith that I will pardon him, and we did that on Friday,” Youngkin said. “We righted a wrong. He should’ve never been prosecuted here. This was a dad standing up for his daughter.”

“His daughter had been sexually assaulted in the bathroom of a school, and no one was doing anything about it,” he continued adding that the school superintendent has “covered it up.”

The pardon was indeed issued on Friday, and can be read here. Scott Smith thanked Governor Youngkin over Twitter/X today once he made the announcement.
https://twitter.com/scottsm25937858/status/1700866737342656629
Good for Governor Youngkin for issuing the pardon and ending this farce for the Smith family. However, the justice system in this country is now bent on lawfare, and the left has spent a lot of time getting themselves elected into state and commonwealth attorney’s positions. And in those positions, they are able to make ordinary people’s lives miserable and cause a lot of damage. And Republicans and sane Democrats need to start paying attention to these races at the local level in order to bring sanity back to the justice system.

Featured image: Glenn Youngkin via Flickr, cropped, Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)