The Virginia Abolition Stor
VIRGINIANS FOR
ALTERNATIVES
TO THE DEATH PENALTY
VADP’s Thirty Year Journey
By Dale M. Brumfield
On July 1, 2021, Virginia’s death penalty will be
officially abolished, and like slavery, lynching,
and eugenics, will dissolve as a dark chapter in the
Commonwealth’s past.
Virginia introduced the death
penalty to Colonial America
in 1608, when Capt. George
Kendall was shot for treason.
Capital punishment is Virginia’s
longest continuing institution,
executing 1,390 people over 413
years. That is more killings than
any other state, including Texas.
Since the founding of Jamestown, Virginia has
executed 94 women, over twice as many as runner
-up Massachusetts, and about one-fourth of all
female executions nationwide. Seventy-eight of
these women were Black, eleven were white,
and the remaining five their races unknown.
Only three white women have been executed since
the Revolutionary War: Susannah Brazier was
hanged in 1774 and Mary Snodgrass in 1896 for
murdering a child. Teresa Lewis was executed by
lethal injection in 2010 in a murder-for-hire case.
During the 1790-1865 antebellum period, Virginia
executed about 736 slaves, accounting for roughly
86 percent of all slave executions nationwide.
Sixteen juveniles were also executed by Virginia
before they reached their eighteenth birthday,
including a slave named Rebecca, who was 11 or
12 years of age when she was hanged in 1825.
During the Jim Crow era, Virginia used hangings,
then the electric chair, as legal lynching. Mostly
young, Black males were frequently convicted in
minutes-long trials then rushed into execution,
sometimes with no legal counsel, and for crimes
like highway robbery, attempted assault, or even
scaring a white school girl.
Law enforcement and judges seemed to be more
concerned with preserving their version of the
sanctity of the courts than with protecting the
accused prisoner, and saw nothing improper about
these “rocket docket” trials which were frequently
utilized to placate looming lynch mobs. Platitudes
such as “let the law take its course” were
interpreted by angry mobs as dog-whistle for
“we will do the lynching for you, legally.”
The October 12, 1984, pe *
electrocution of Linwood
Briley proved that toxic
mob-driven racism still
lingered decades later.
Just before midnight,a |
small group of volunteers ™
gathered beside the Virginia State Penitentiary in
the heart of Richmond for a candlelight prayer
vigil. Meanwhile, a much larger mob that would
have been as familiar in 1904 as in 1984 gathered
across the street, shouting racial epithets and
waving Confederate flags and homemade signs
proclaiming racist slogans like “kill the n-word,”
“fry Briley fry,” and far, far worse.
Future VADP Executive Director Michael Stone,
then a staff member at the Catholic Diocese of
Richmond , recalls the visceral impact of that
event, which he had been encouraged to attend by
Bishop Walter F. Sullivan, a long-time prison
reform and anti-death penalty advocate.
The Virginia Abolition Story — A VADP Special Report
The Virginia Abolition Story
“Seeing the raw racism expressed by the large
crowd cheering the death of a Black man had a
profound impact on me and motivated my long
opposition to capital punishment.”
Another vigil participant Nancy Gowen, whose
mother, Mary Gowen, had been raped and mur-
dered by the Briley gang, expressed an unusual
sentiment to a United Press International reporter.
“T think it’s something wrong with our system,”
she articulated as she eyed the raucous celebrants
across the road, “... I don’t think to murder some-
one for a murder committed is the answer.”
In the Fall of 1991, a small group assembled at the
request of tough-as-nails abolitionist and death
row counselor, Marie Deans,
to discuss opposition to the
#8 death penalty. Deans had
moved to Virginia from South
Carolina eight years earlier to
form the Virginia Coalition
on Jails and Prisons, in part to
improve conditions in the
prisons and especially on
death row.
Early efforts to abolish Virginia’s death penalty
date to 1928, when the Commonwealth’s first
female Senator, Sarah Lee Fain, unsuccessfully
introduced the first abolition bill. After another
failed effort in 1960, Virginia joined an unofficial
multi-state moratorium on capital punishment in
1962 when support dropped to an all-time low.
The 1972 U. S. Supreme Court decision Furman v
Georgia found the death penalty unconstitutional,
but in a 1976 case, Gregg v Georgia, the Court
reinstated capital punishment. With public opinion
for the death penalty climbing, Virginia resumed
executions in 1982.
Deans pointed out to the group that a Virginia
Tech poll showed that while death penalty support
topped out at 75 percent, it decreased significantly
when given the option of life imprisonment, with
no possibility of parole, combined with some form
of restitution to murder victims’ families.
“A part of that group ... felt that the information
was enough to do something with,” says Henry
Heller, the first director of Virginians Against
State Killing (VASK). The organization was soon
renamed Virginians Against the Death Penalty,
then later became Virginians for Alternatives to
the Death Penalty, or VADP. “We decided to
change the name from being ‘against’ to ‘for’
something,” Heller explains.
The 1990s was a frustrating decade. Prosecutors
and legislators seemed consumed with killing and
sometimes went to legally questionable lengths to
assure a death sentence.
Strong public support
drove Virginia to sentence
five to 10 people to death,
and execute up to 14
people each year. “The
death penalty seemed to
be in the news daily. And
I did my best to keep it
out there,” Heller recalls.
Popular support did not waver despite many
rushed sentences, executions, and the very real
possibilities of innocence of prisoners such as Jo-
seph O’Dell, and reports of the botched electrocu-
tions of Frank Coppola and Wilbert Lee Evans.
“Americans [do not] give a hoot about killing
people. They really don’t give a hoot about killing
them fairly, either,” a frustrated Marie Deans
wrote in 1986. “As long as there is the appearance
of fairness in the death penalty, they will accept
executions as a necessary evil.”
In the early 2000s, support for the death penalty
stalled at around 75 percent, but support for an
alternative was increasing. “I'd get up in front of
those [legislative] committees and wave these
findings at them,” Henry Heller recalls. “But in
those days, only a few were interested.”
The Virginia Abolition Story 2
The Virginia Abolition Story
Few legislators then would introduce abolition
bills, only to watch them die in committee. Heller
remained pragmatic in the face of these setbacks
as he searched for common ground.
“T didn’t get disappointed when [Frank] Har-
grove’s bill in the House of Delegates, [or] Henry
Marsh’s bill in the Senate would never get out of
committee,” he recalls. “I was actually pushing for
a moratorium bill as that sounded more palatable.”
When Heller stepped down in 2002, Jack Payden
-Travers jumped into the fire. “As the new
director of VADP I reached out to the chaplain at
Sussex I State Prison and used to accompany him
on his death row visits,” he says. “That was a short
-lived opportunity. When my
name became public in the
media surrounding each
execution, [a] new warden
ended my visitation access
to the men on the row. I
never was able to return to
those men in person, but we
helped others to both write
and visit with the men.”
Payden-Travers also recalls that his appointment
coincided with the DC sniper court cases. “Their
trials were held consecutively in the Fall of 2003
in Virginia Beach and Chesapeake,” he recalls. “I
would maintain a daily vigil in front of each court-
house during the trials while living Monday
[through] Friday at the Norfolk Catholic Worker.”
John Allen Muhammad was sentenced to death,
but his young accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo,
received life without parole. Public support for the
death penalty reportedly jumped from 68 percent
to 77 percent after this case.
In 2006 Payden-Travers worked with Earl Wash-
ington Jr., Virginia’s only death row exoneree, and
provided support for the legal team that worked on
his civil trial in Charlottesville. Washington had
been sentenced to death on a wrongful conviction,
spent 19 years in prison, and was days away from
execution before DNA evidence exonerated him.
His near-execution is chronicled by Margaret Edds
in her 2006 book “An Expendable Man.”
Before the Earl Washington debacle, the death
penalty “seemed to be a trusted, well-oiled
machine of death,” recalls long-time advocate
Debbie Simpson of her experiences at execution
vigils by Greensville Correctional Center. “We
could determine nearly to the minute when the
body would be declared dead and then driven
away. That is when we, with lit candles, lined the
side of the road as a truck resembling a Schwan’s
delivery truck would drive the body away.”
Simpson recalls the most unsettling vigils were
those where family members of the condemned
were also present, such as during the January 2000
execution of Steve Roach, who was executed for a
murder he committed as a juvenile.
As people lined up by the
roadside, Roach’s young,
newly-widowed wife
stepped in beside her.
“T didn’t know what to
say, I’d never been ina
situation like this before
... Lonly had words of sorrow and a need to say
that we didn’t do enough. I was so very sorry.”
In 2005 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the ex-
ecution of those under the age of 18 at the time of
their crimes was cruel and unusual punishment.
Too late for Steve Roach, and hundreds of others.
New death sentences plummeted after 2002 when
the legislature created the Virginia Indigent
Defense Commission. Those accused of capital
crimes now had highly-qualified full-time capital
defenders replacing often inadequate court-
appointed lawyers, who were paid scale and some-
times fell asleep in court, showed up intoxicated,
or failed to call defense witnesses. The playing
field against prosecutors had finally been leveled.
3 The Virginia Abolition Story
The Virginia Abolition Story
“The abolition movement and VADP brought
together some of the most caring, passionate and
dedicated people I have ever met,” says Beth
Panilaitis, who served as Executive Director from
2008 to 2010 and as a Board member from 2011
to 2016. “People came to abolition from different
places — faith, racial justice, connections with
those on death row — [and] were willing to make
sacrifices to help others.”
Advocates met with legislators,
held execution vigils, and orga-
nized gatherings to speak about
the death penalty. “That’s how
VADP survived with little fund-
ing and a good deal of opposition
.. the optimism and faith of
those volunteers and activists.”
Over the years, VADP and its allies opposed
legislation that expanded the crimes eligible for
capital sentences and bills that shrouded the
source of lethal execution drugs in secrecy.
Michael Stone brought memories of that Briley
execution, his work with the National Coalition to
Abolish the Death Penalty, and a goal to “broaden
support for abolition across the political spectrum”
when he took over as Executive Director in 2015.
In 2017, with a grant from the Sisters of Bon
Secours, VADP hired full-time Field Director
Dale Brumfield to conduct grassroots educational
presentations on the death penalty to Republican,
Libertarian, Democrat, faith-based, and civic
organizations in target legislative districts around
the state. The goal was to raise awareness and
build grassroots support for abolition.
With the General Assembly not yet ready to
seriously consider death penalty abolition, VADP
worked with mental health organizations for five
years on a bill to exempt people with severe
mental illness from receiving a death sentence.
This bill was a good vehicle for educating state
legislators about the problems still endemic with
Virginia’s system of capital punishment. This
effort was so successful that the Senate passed the
bill in both the 2019 and 2020 legislative sessions.
Unfortunately, the legislation was defeated both
years in the House of Delegates.
The abolition of the death penalty in 2021 —
the thirtieth anniversary of VADP — was the
convergence of several key factors. The police
murder of George Floyd and the subsequent Black
Lives Matter movement shined a bright spotlight
on racial inequities in the criminal justice system.
The superb work of abolition bill patrons — Sen.
Scott Surovell and of Del. Mike Mullin — was key
within the General Assembly. The strong support
for abolition by Governor Ralph Northam in his
State of the Commonwealth address was crucial.
“T was stunned, saddened,
and uplifted when news
reached me that our legisla-
ture finally voted to end
use of the death penalty,”
declares former death row
inmate-turned-paralegal
Joe Giarratano. “Then I
chuckled. I could hear
Marie [Dean]’s voice in my
head, “Get back to work, all of you, the job is is not
done. States continue to kill in our names to show
that killing is wrong.””
“T look forward to Governor Northam signing this
bill into law that will make Virginia the first
Southern state to abandon the death penalty,”
Stone concludes. “We hope that Virginia will set
an example for other states from the Confederacy
to take this bold step toward the humane reform of
our legal justice system.”
— Dale Brumfield, VADP Field Director
The Virginia Abolition Story 4
