Virginia abolishes death penalty
State executed almost 1,400 people over a 400 year span
After more than 400 years and nearly 1,400 lives, the death penalty is dead in Virginia.
Gov. Ralph Northam signed legislation Wednesday abolishing it in a state that has executed more people than any other. The ceremony was at Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, where lethal injections and electrocutions have been carried out for 30 years.
“The death penalty is fundamentally flawed,” Northam said before signing the bills into law. “It is the moral thing to do to end (it).”
Lawmakers in the Democratically-controlled House of Delegates and state Senate passed identical bills last month that would end death sentences and executions. There are two men on death row in the state. Their sentences will be converted to life without the possibility of parole.
Virginia is the 23rd state to stop executions, and the first in the South.
Before abolishing the death penalty, Northam toured the Greensville prison, including the execution chamber. “It is a powerful thing to stand in the room where
people have been put to death. I know that experience will stay with me for the rest of my life.”
It also reinforced his decision to sign the bills, the governor said before making a case for ending capital punishment. The system doesn’t always get it right, he said, noting the case of Earl Washington Jr., who was convicted of a 1982 rape and murder and sentenced to death. He served 16 years in prison before being exonerated, at one point coming within days of being executed.
“The system was nine days from executing an innocent man,” Northam said. “The system did not work. The system allowed an innocent man to be convicted of murder.”
Northam and several other speakers said the death penalty had been unfairly weaponized against Black people, essentially saying it was a form of state-sponsored lynching. Northam pointed to statistics showing that 296 of the 377 people executed in Virginia in the 20th century were Black, and a defendant was three times more likely to get the death penalty if a victim was white as opposed to Black.
“That is simply wrong,” he said. Sen. Scott Surovell, the Mount Vernon Democrat who wrote the Senate bill abolishing the death penalty, echoed the governor. He said he recently learned 45 Black men were executed for rape between 1908 and 1948. Of the 808 white men convicted of rape during that span, not one was put to death.
“Not a single one. That says to you a lot about what that penalty was used for,” Surovell said, recalling that his colleague, Sen. Mamie Locke, had spoken on the Senate floor about a direct correlation between the rise of the death penalty in Virginia and the end of lynching.
Virginia’s death penalty has deep roots in slavery, lynching and Jim Crow segregation, according to a news release from the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington-based nonprofit organization.
From 1900 until 1977, when the U.S. Supreme Court banned the death penalty for offenses that did not result in death, Virginia executed 73 Black men — but no one who was white — on charges of rape, attempted rape, or robbery.
“The connection is really undeniable,” Surovell said. “Virginia’s history on the death penalty is really ugly.”
The debate about the death penalty has become entangled with that history and not focused on the punishment itself, said Phil Evans, a longtime Norfolk prosecutor who recently retired. Evans helped prosecute both of the men who were on Virginia’s death row until Wednesday afternoon.
Capital punishment is a complicated issue, Evans said, and he declined to say whether he supported its abolition. But state lawmakers should have reached out to victims’ families before they went ahead with legislation abolishing it, he said.
One of the two men Evans helped send to death row is Thomas A. Porter, who was sentenced in 2007 for murdering Norfolk police officer Stanley Cornell Reaves during a robbery call in Park Place in October 2005. Reaves, 33, left behind a wife and two young children.
Evans said he still keeps in touch with Reaves’ family and knows they weren’t contacted during the legislative process. “It puts his widow and family in a difficult position as they’re learning (about legislation) through the media.”
The other death row inmate is Anthony Juniper, convicted in 2005 for the slaying of four people in Norfolk — his former girlfriend, her brother and her two small children.
Evans doesn’t keep in touch with the victims’ family personally but state officials hadn’t reached out to the Norfolk Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office to try to make contact when Evans retired last month.
Everyone can talk about the death penalty as a theoretical entity, but victims’ families — those are the people who’ve had to live through tragedy and horror, Evans said. “I just fear that...we perhaps have not given enough consideration to them.”
Historically, Virginia has used the death penalty more than any other state, executing nearly 1,400 people since its days as a colony, according to data from the nonprofit organization. Since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, Virginia, with 113 executions, is second only to Texas, with 570.
But over the past two decades, capital punishment has steadily faded, including in Virginia. The Death Penalty Information Center says 22 states had abolished it before Virginia joined the list Wednesday, with 12 others not having had an execution in more than a decade.
Changes in law — along with prosecutors seeking the ultimate punishment in far fewer cases — has resulted in death sentences falling to 34 nationally in 2019. That’s down from 315 death sentences handed down in 1996, the nonprofit’s numbers show. Executions, meantime, fell to 22 in 2019 from a high of 98 in 1999.
The drops follow a shift in public opinion: A 2018 Gallup poll showed 54% of respondents support the death penalty for murder.
Though that’s up five points from the 49% who said the same two years earlier, it’s down significantly from the 78% who held that view in the late 1990s.
In Virginia, only five people have been executed since 2011 — down sharply from the 57 executions performed between 1995 and 2000. The state’s last two death sentences were handed down 10 years ago.