Meet Your Commonwealth's Attorney

The Honorable Ramin Fatehi, a Hampton Roads native, has served as a prosecutor since 2006, the last eight years right here in the Norfolk Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office, where he has worked every day to serve justice by treating defendants fairly, victims with dignity, and the community with the commitment to its values.

Prior to his service in Norfolk, Mr. Fatehi was an Assistant Public Defender in Richmond, an Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney in Chesapeake, and a Special Assistant United States Attorney in Charlottesville. Mr. Fatehi has tried 45 jury trials for cases including murder, home invasion, rape, armed robbery, burglary, drug distribution, and embezzlement. Mr. Fatehi has lost count of the hundreds of bench trials he has tried.

Before his election, Mr. Fatehi supervised a team of lawyers and staff in the Norfolk office responsible for prosecuting drug offenses, intoxicated driving, and fatal auto crashes. Mr. Fatehi strives to ensure that every accused person is treated as a person on his or her own merits, that every grieving victim feels as if the system is doing what it can to make them whole, and that the community feels as if there is a single kind of justice for all accused persons independent of their race, their parents, their wealth, or their ZIP code.

Mr. Fatehi was born in Suffolk, Virginia, and moved to Tehran, Iran, as a baby. In Iran, Mr. Fatehi's father, a neurosurgeon, and his American-born mother, a nurse, raised Mr. Fatehi to be proud of his American heritage and to stand up for his mother and her country. Mr. Fatehi's family moved to Hampton Roads when he was 7, and he showed the same pride in his father’s Iranian heritage that he had for his mother’s American heritage. When elected, Mr. Fatehi became only the second Iranian-American chief prosecutor in the nation.

Mr. Fatehi graduated high school from Norfolk Academy; earned his bachelor’s degree in history at Yale University; and earned his law degree at Columbia Law School. After law school, Mr. Fatehi had the honor of serving as a law clerk to the Hon. Elizabeth B. Lacy, the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court of Virginia, and then worked in corporate law in Washington, D.C., before choosing to become a Public Defender in Richmond.

Mr. Fatehi lives in Colonial Place with his wife Mary Beth, a Senior Lecturer at Old Dominion University, and his sons Thomas (4) and James (3).