Stephanie Morales is one of only a handful of prosecutors who has prosecuted and won a conviction in a case of a white police officer who killed a black person. On Tuesday, she won her re-election campaign in Portsmouth, Virginia, an indication of public support for a strong response to police violence.

Morales, who was an assistant commonwealth attorney before being elected top prosecutor in a 2015 special election, defeated attorney T.J. Wright V, who has five years of experience as a family law and criminal defense attorney. Unofficial elections results from the City of Portsmouth on Tuesday night showed Morales with 17,594 votes to Wright’s 10,290 votes, with all 32 precincts reporting.

Her election sent a message that “if someone runs on a platform of integrity, of independence from special interests and holding police accountable — you can run on that platform and you can win,” Michael Kieschnick, whose PAC Real Justice, founded by veterans of the Bernie Sanders campaign, backed Morales, told The Intercept as election results were coming in.

Her victory comes on the heels of a contentious campaign in which she lost the support of influential local Democrats who accused her of using her office improperly.

Morales was first elected to be Portsmouth’s commonwealth attorney in a February 2015 special election. She made waves a few months later, when she prosecuted former Portsmouth police Officer Stephen Rankin for killing William Chapman II, an unarmed black teenager, in a Walmart parking lot. Morales won a voluntary manslaughter conviction in the case, and Rankin is now serving a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence.

Morales, a Democrat, ran on a progressive criminal justice reform platform that included promises to combat mass incarceration and reform the cash-bail system such that nonviolent offenders are not detained based solely on an inability to pay. Wright, on the other hand, ran on a promise to “mend relationships with the Portsmouth Police Department.”