Virginia outlaws death penalty
JARRATT, Va. — The governor signed legislation Wednesday making Virginia the 23rd state to abolish the death penalty, a dramatic shift for the commonwealth, which had the second-highest number of executions in the U.S. behind Texas.
The bills were the culmination of a yearslong battle by Democrats who argued the death penalty has been applied disproportionately to people of color, the mentally ill and the poor.
Republicans argued that the death penalty should remain a sentencing option for especially heinous crimes and to bring justice to victims and their families.
Virginia’s new Democratic majority, in full control of the General Assembly for a second year, won the debate last month when both the Senate and House of Delegates passed the measures banning capital punishment.
Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, signed the House and Senate bills in a ceremony under a tent Wednesday after touring the execution chamber at the Greensville Correctional Center, where 102 people have been put to death since executions were moved there from the Virginia State Penitentiary in the early 1990s.
“There is no place today for the death penalty in this commonwealth, in the South or in this nation,” Northam said shortly before signing the legislation.
Northam said the death penalty has been disproportionately applied to Black people and is the product of a flawed judicial system that doesn’t always get it right. Since 1973, more than 170 people around the country have been released from death row after evidence of their innocence was uncovered, he said.
Northam recounted the story of Earl Washington Jr., a Black man who was sentenced to death after being wrongfully convicted of rape and murder in Virginia in 1984. Washington spent more than 17 years in prison before he was exonerated.
He came within nine days of being executed.
Virginia has executed nearly 1,400 people since its days as a colony. In modern times, the state is second only to Texas in the number of executions it has carried out, with 113 since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, according to the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center.
The sentences of the two men still on death row will be converted to life in prison without parole.
BOULDER, Colo. — An employee of the Colorado supermarket where a gunman killed 10 people watched as the assailant opened fire, and she narrowly escaped his notice while joining with other bystanders in a desperate scramble to get away.
Emily Giffen, 27, was smoking outside the store during a break Monday when she heard multiple loud pops that she knew weren’t fireworks. She said she saw a man running across an intersection suddenly fall over and another man approach him in a crouch and fire several rounds at close range.
“I don’t know how he didn’t see us,” she said of the suspect, who walked right by her before she ran into the King Soopers store and out the back.
Newly fallen snow made people trip and slip as they tried to escape, she said, showing a large bruise on her arm that she said happened when someone stepped on her.
“I just really am having a hard time understanding why me and my friends deserve to die,” she said, wondering why the gunman targeted the store. “It doesn’t seem personal, so I don’t quite get why we pulled that lottery ticket.”
Giffen spoke Wednesday as families mourned the dead and multiple law enforcement agencies pressed ahead with what they said would be a monthslong investigation. They revealed no new details.
The 21-year-old suspect, Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, was in jail and scheduled to make his first court appearance Thursday on murder charges. No lawyer was listed for Alissa in court records.
Meanwhile, hundreds of people paid their respects at a growing makeshift memorial near the supermarket, adorning it with wreaths, candles, banners reading “#Boulderstrong,” and 10 crosses with blue hearts and the victims’ names.
Several community vigils were planned to honor the victims.
The Boulder Police Department invited the public to show support for Officer Eric Talley, who was killed responding to the shooting, during a procession Wednesday as his body was transported from the coroner’s office to a funeral home.
Talley, 51, was the first officer to arrive at the scene. Homer Talley described his son as a devoted father who “knew the Lord.” He had seven children, ages 7 to 20.
The other victims were Denny Stong, 20; Neven Stanisic, 23; Rikki Olds, 25; Tralona Bartkowiak, 49; Suzanne Fountain, 59; Teri Leiker, 51; Kevin Mahoney, 61; Lynn Murray, 62; and Jodi Waters, 65.
Olds, Leiker and Stong worked at the supermarket.
Kim Cordova, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7, which represents more than 30 store employees, said the victims did their best to get customers to safety.
“They grabbed everybody they could, and they brought them to the back room or to other areas of the store to hide, or got them out through the back dock,” Cordova said.
Giffen said her friends didn’t deserve to die at work while doing their jobs.
“This guy, he went hunting in a barrel full of fish. Nobody was prepared to fight back. No one was even prepared to hide,” she said. “It’s just the fear like, where do you, where do I ever feel safe?”
Giffen, who said she has worked at the King Soopers for three years, described a close-knit community where she chats with customers and remembers their bagel orders from when she worked at a nearby bagel place.
On the neighborhood-based social media app Nextdoor, Giffen watched as people asked about her co-workers by name, listing them one by one to find out if they were all right.
“It was so beautiful to see all of these people who live right here with me actually acknowledge individual people’s names,” she said. “They don’t just know us as their employees. We’re a part of their community.”
The attack was the nation’s deadliest mass shooting since a 2019 assault on a Walmart in El Paso, where a gunman killed 22 people.
It was also the seventh mass killing this year in the U.S., following the March 16 shooting that left eight people dead at three Atlanta-area massage businesses, according to a database compiled by the AP, USA Today and Northeastern University.