Capital punishment endured in Virginia due to Virginians
The Angel of Death Row, Marie Deans, fought against the death penalty, and wrongful convictions, until her passing in 2011
There’s a reason why capital punishment endured so long in Virginia: It was popular. That often matters in a democracy.
There’s always been opposition to the death penalty in Virginia, on one basis or another, but not sufficient to shift support against it in the General Assembly.
Now, with identical measures advancing in the Virginia House and Senate, and the governor prepared to sign the legislation, this always controversial business will end for once and, maybe, for all.
It takes knowing a little history to understand the role of the death penalty in Virginia — how it came back in 1982 following a 20-year hiatus, why it was vigorously re-embraced and often used afterwards.
Unfortunately, a lot of rubbish made its way into last week’s Senate floor debate, as capital punishment worked its way out of the Virginia statutes.
Sen. Scott Surovell, a Fairfax Democrat, for instance, stood up during the debate and pondered the assorted official instruments of execution — the electric chair, lethal injection — and figures they’ll now be objects in a museum, “sitting next to the slave auctioneer block.”
“People are going to look back and wonder how it was we ever used these things,” said Surovell.
With cold-blooded readiness. That’s how, senator, if you’d like to know.
Once legally sanctioned and clear of constitutional challenge, a practice — even a practice such as capital punishment — will reveal its public support at the ballot box and, appalling though it may be, it will proceed.
Again, it’s called democracy. That’s not a defense. It’s an explanation.
Capital punishment, public arguments notwithstanding, had little to do with deterrence and much to do with anger, vengeance and retribution.
“There are clearly cases,” Sen.
Mark D. Obenshain, R-Harrisonburg, said during the floor debate, “in which capital punishment is an appropriate sanction.”
That was the nub of it. Do onto others what they have already done onto you. There were times — in the majority view — when capital punishment constituted a just outcome.
Hard to understand? Not if you read the files. Not if you confronted the details. Which I did, late one night in the governor’s office, 30-odd years ago.
Reaction: There are some god-awful human beings roaming about the world. I have never changed my mind about capital punishment — I’m not for it — but you cannot examine the particulars and fail to appreciate general public rage.
So, in 2002, after authorities captured two murderous snipers — John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo had terrorized the Washington region and Richmond, killing 10 people — there was a strong public desire to have them tried in Virginia and not in Maryland.
It was a matter of relative enthusiasm. At that point, historian Edmund Morgan wrote, “Maryland
had conducted a mere three executions since 1976, Virginia could boast of 87.”
Muhammad was executed in Virginia in November 2009, and, as it happens, Malvo could be paroled next year.
So, what has changed? I asked that question of Lloyd Snook, the Charlottesville attorney who for years threw himself into one death row case after another, often to no avail. Snook was valiant in his pursuit of justice, but deflected encomiums to another.
“Any account of the campaign against the death penalty in Virginia has to start with Marie Deans,” he said.
“The Angel of Death Row,” some called her. After she died in 2011, The Washington Post said she preferred the phrase “courageous fool.”
Deans was instrumental in getting Earl Washington’s conviction overturned — the first time in Virginia that DNA evidence led to the freeing of a death-row prisoner.
Technology got people thinking anew. It helped make a difference.
And, according to Snook, there were two other factors: better funded, more finely skilled legal representation for defendants and the option, beginning in 1999, to tell jurors that “life means life” and not parole.
“I had a capital client whom the jury sentenced to death because they believed that he’d be out on parole in seven years,” Snook says. “Once we could tell the jurors that the guy would be behind bars for life, the number of death penalty verdicts began to drop precipitously, and has been at zero for the last 10 years.”
Could you lay the death penalty’s lasting popularity to its symbolic value as a surrogate for all violent crime? That was one theory.
But “theory” only had limited involvement in this work. The death penalty endured because it seemed, to most Virginians, to be a good idea.
After writing editorials for the Daily Press and The Virginian-Pilot in the 1980s, Gordon C.
Morse wrote speeches for Gov. Gerald L. Baliles, then spent nearly three decades working on behalf of corporate and philanthropic organizations, including PepsiCo, CSX, Tribune Co., the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and Dominion Energy. His email address is gordonmorse@msn.com.