An admitted child molester in Fairfax County, Virginia, may have his criminal record sealed from public view, thanks to a collision between a new state law designed to give nonviolent offenders a fresh start and a series of prosecutorial failures in the office of Commonwealth's Attorney Steve Descano, a progressive prosecutor bankrolled by George Soros.
The case centers on Joshua Danehower, who confessed in 2019 to sexually abusing a child over the course of several years. Danehower admitted to the abuse in a recorded phone call monitored by Fairfax County police detectives. He told the victim he was "sorry" and acknowledged the abuse, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
Despite that recorded confession, Descano's office fumbled the prosecution so badly that Danehower walked away with a misdemeanor plea deal. Now, under Virginia's Clean Slate Act, that misdemeanor conviction could be automatically sealed, removing it from public background checks and leaving parents, schools, and employers in the dark about what Danehower did.
Fairfax County police arrested Danehower in 2019 after the victim came forward and detectives arranged the monitored call. On that call, Danehower admitted to the sexual abuse and apologized. Prosecutors in Descano's office initially charged him with felony aggravated sexual battery of a minor.
But the case never made it to a felony trial. The Free Beacon's reporting reveals that Descano's office allowed the case to languish, cycling through multiple prosecutors. The original prosecutor assigned to the case left the office. A replacement was assigned, then reassigned. At one point, the office failed to disclose required evidence to the defense in a timely manner, creating a Brady problem that threatened the admissibility of key evidence.
The victim's family grew increasingly frustrated as months stretched into years. The family told the Free Beacon that prosecutors stopped returning their calls and failed to keep them informed about the status of the case, a basic obligation under Virginia's Crime Victims' Rights Act.
By the time the case finally moved toward resolution, the felony charge had been reduced. Danehower pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault and battery, a charge that does not carry sex-offender registration requirements. He received no jail time.
Virginia's Clean Slate Act, which took effect in stages beginning in 2025, automatically seals certain criminal records without requiring the defendant to petition a court. The law was designed to help people convicted of minor, nonviolent offenses reenter society without the burden of a permanent record. Supporters pitched it as a second-chance measure for marijuana possession cases, minor thefts, and similar low-level convictions.
The law's automatic sealing provisions apply to misdemeanor convictions after a waiting period, provided the person has no subsequent convictions. Because Danehower's felony charge was reduced to a misdemeanor, his conviction falls squarely within the statute's reach.
Once sealed, the record would no longer appear on standard background checks. Employers, landlords, volunteer organizations, and schools running background screenings would see no record of the conviction. Virginia law does allow certain law enforcement agencies to access sealed records, but the general public and private screening companies would be locked out.
The victim's family raised alarms about this possibility with state legislators. They argued that the Clean Slate Act contains no carve-out for misdemeanor convictions that originated as felony sex-offense charges and were pleaded down. The law, as written, does not distinguish between a shoplifting conviction and a child sexual abuse case that was reduced to simple assault through prosecutorial failure.
Steve Descano won the Fairfax County Commonwealth's Attorney race in 2019 after receiving roughly $600,000 from a political action committee funded by George Soros. He ran on a reform platform that emphasized reducing incarceration, declining to prosecute certain low-level offenses, and rethinking how the office handled cases.
Critics, including veteran prosecutors who left his office, have said those priorities created a culture of disorganization and neglect that harmed victims of serious crimes. The Danehower case, they argue, is a textbook example. A recorded confession to child sexual abuse should have produced a straightforward felony conviction. Instead, staff turnover, evidence-handling failures, and lack of supervision turned it into a misdemeanor plea with no prison time.
Descano's office is not the only Soros-funded prosecutor's office to face scrutiny for records and transparency issues. In the same jurisdiction, Fairfax County's DA office has blocked public records requests related to a legal aid program for migrants facing criminal charges, raising separate questions about how the office handles public accountability.
The pattern extends well beyond Northern Virginia. In Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court recently stripped Soros-backed DA Larry Krasner of the authority to free convicted killers without judicial oversight, a rare judicial rebuke of a sitting prosecutor's unilateral power.
Descano's office did not provide a detailed response to the Free Beacon's questions about the Danehower case. A spokesperson offered a general statement about the office's commitment to justice for victims but did not address the specific failures identified in the reporting.
The family has called on Virginia legislators to amend the Clean Slate Act to exclude any conviction that originated as a felony sex offense, regardless of its final disposition. Under their proposed fix, if a defendant was initially charged with a felony sexual crime against a child and the charge was later reduced through a plea agreement, the resulting conviction would be ineligible for automatic sealing.
They have also asked for a victim-notification requirement. As the law currently stands, automatic sealing can occur without any notice to the victim or the victim's family. The family learned about the sealing possibility only through their own research, not from the prosecutor's office or the court system.
Some Virginia legislators have expressed interest in revisiting the Clean Slate Act's scope, though no formal amendment has been introduced as of the Free Beacon's reporting. The political dynamics are complicated. The law passed with bipartisan support, and its sponsors have resisted changes they view as undermining its core purpose.
The broader debate over progressive prosecution and public safety continues to play out in jurisdictions across the country. In Houston, a Harris County DA candidate has pledged fewer arrests even as violent crime remains a central concern for residents, reflecting the same philosophical divide that shaped Descano's approach in Fairfax County.
The Danehower case exposes a structural flaw that Clean Slate Act supporters did not publicly grapple with before the law passed. Plea bargaining is the engine of the American criminal justice system. Roughly 95 percent of criminal cases in the United States are resolved through plea deals, not trials. Felony charges are routinely reduced to misdemeanors for reasons that have nothing to do with the defendant's actual conduct: witness availability, evidence-handling errors, caseload pressure, or prosecutorial discretion.
When an automatic-sealing law draws its eligibility line at the conviction level rather than the charge level, it inherits every failure and compromise that produced that conviction. A child sexual abuse case that collapses into a misdemeanor because a prosecutor's office lost track of it does not become a minor offense. It becomes a minor conviction, and those are two very different things.
Virginia's law treats them as identical. The statute looks at the final conviction on the docket, not the original charges, not the underlying conduct, and not the reason the charges were reduced. For cases involving violent or sexual offenses against children, that design choice carries consequences the legislature may not have intended but has not yet moved to fix.
Former prosecutors in other jurisdictions have raised similar alarms about the gap between progressive policy goals and street-level public safety. A former prosecutor recently warned about public safety blind spots created when institutional priorities shift away from enforcement and accountability.
Danehower's misdemeanor conviction will become eligible for automatic sealing once the statutory waiting period expires, unless Virginia's legislature acts first. The victim's family has retained counsel to explore whether any legal mechanism exists to block the sealing in this specific case, but the statute as written offers limited grounds for objection.
The family has also filed complaints about the handling of the case with the Virginia State Bar, though the outcome of any bar review is not yet public. Descano faces reelection pressures of his own, and the Danehower case has become a focal point for critics who argue his office prioritizes ideological goals over victim safety.
Fairfax County police detectives did their job. They got a recorded confession. They built a case that should have ended with a felony conviction and a sex-offender registration. Everything that went wrong happened after the case left their hands.
When a law designed to give shoplifters a second chance can erase an admitted child molester's record, the problem is not just one prosecutor's incompetence. It is a system that stopped asking the only question that matters: who is being protected?
