A welcome end to death penalty
For all of capital punishment’s public support in Va., ambivalence long reigned as well
With all the many claims on history emanating from Richmond these days, the end to capital punishment in Virginia genuinely crosses the threshold of significant.
The commonwealth made liberal use of this provision and with only occasional interruption. The numbers tell a tale of public enthusiasm and political upkeep — and the numbers may be low. Prior to the arrival of the electric chair, executions were routinely administered in Virginia at the local level by hanging and the records, in some jurisdictions, are sketchy.
In any case, Virginia strongly favored this dire and conclusive act of judgment. There’s no question on that.
But why? Not to discourage crime, really. That argument involved more rationalization than reason.
We’ve pretty well known that for a long time. Looking at the numbers of homicides in states with capital punishment and those without it, the Richmond Times-Dispatch editorially concluded that “capital punishment is not a deterrent to crime … (and) ought therefore to be abolished.” That was in 1935.
So why did the practice still endure? It was more about matching tit for tat, blood for blood, head for head and that nexus, that impulse alone, for a very long time in Virginia, sufficed to sustain the executioner’s labor.
It was payback, in other words.
And, yet, for all of capital punishment’s public support in Virginia, ambivalence long reigned as well.
In 1892, the Roanoke Times published a copyrighted story by James Berry, a British hangman, well capturing the great capital punishment straddle. “If I may attach much weight to the Scriptural injunction: ‘Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed,’ I think that the abolition of capital punishment would be a defiance of the Divine command,” Berry wrote.
But then the practiced hangman, who conducted 183 executions over nearly a nine-year period in Great Britain and Ireland, proceeded to explain why he
turned against the practice.
No criminal gets much pity, he conceded. Yet, “I have come to the conclusion, not suddenly, but by degrees, that the policy of hanging is a bad one, that it is not such punishment for murder as an enlightened Christian country ought to carry out; that it has no deterring influence in repressing crime — even that of murder.”
Moreover, Berry wrote 129 years ago,
“… the new instructions which have been circulated through all the jails deprives the executioner of his personal independence and actual responsibility, while it lays him open to the reproach of consequences resulting from the action of others.”
There was the nub of it: doubt.
Did the system — including all the people functioning within the system — get it right? Death is death. There is no degree and, once done, no walking it back. Therefore, capital punishment assumes perfect human judgment. That British executioner, long ago, knew how unlikely that was in all instances at all times.
Even so, you could have sat in the Virginia General Assembly in the early 1980s, after a nearly two-decade-long court-ordered hiatus of capital punishment, and hear lawmakers repeatedly assure one and all that Virginia’s judiciary made no such errors. Everyone was getting precisely what they deserved.
It was a lie. Perhaps not a conscious, deliberate lie. But a lie nonetheless.
Only the emergence of DNA technology and adequate defense counsel finally confronted legislators with the stark reality that, in some instances, innocent people were being put to death. The state, in fact, was the murderer.
It was a rough business to administer, as U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine — a former governor — acknowledged in The Washington Post the other day. “As governor I kept my word to Virginians that I would follow the law by allowing numerous executions to go forward,” he wrote.
“The days those sentences were carried out were among the worst of my life,” expressing a sentiment held by many modern Virginia governors.
But now it is over. Done. At last.