2/6/2021 House of Delegates passes bill to abolish Virginia's death penalty; governor expected to sign into law - Daily Press
House of Delegates passes bill to abolish
Virginia’s death penalty; governor expected to
sign into law
By PETER DUJARDIN
DAILY PRESS | FEB 05, 2021
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Death penalty opponents gather for a vigil outside the Greensville Correctional... MORE
(Steve Earley)
The Virginia House of Delegates on Friday passed legislation abolishing the death
penalty, which would make the Old Dominion the first southern state to end the
centuries-old practice.
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2/6/2021 House of Delegates passes bill to abolish Virginia's death penalty; governor expected to sign into law - Daily Press
Sponsored by Del. Mike Mullin, D-Newport News, the House bill passed on a 57-41
vote, two days after the Senate passed an identical measure by 21-17. Both votes
were overwhelmingly on party lines, with Democrats in favor of the change and
Republicans opposed.
Gov. Ralph Northam has vowed to sign the measure.
Capital punishment has steadily eroded across the country over the past 20 years,
as prosecutors have largely abandoned the practice and jurors’ concerns mount
over putting an innocent person to death.
Virginia will be the 23rd state in the nation to abolish capital punishment,
according to the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington. Twelve other
states haven’t had an execution in at least 10 years.
Eliminating the chance of a mistake is also among the chief reasons that Virginia
lawmakers have cited for the change in recent weeks.
“A justice system without the death penalty allows us the possibility of being
wrong,” Mullin told lawmakers before the vote. “We’re all human. And we all make
mistakes. The justice system here in the United States, which I believe is the best in
the entire world, is still capable of making mistakes.”
He cited statistics showing that 174 death row inmates have been exonerated
nationally since 1973, many of them cleared with DNA evidence.
One of those was Earl Washington Jr., an intellectually disabled man who came
within nine days of execution after confessing to a 1982 rape and capital murder in
Culpeper County that he didn’t commit.
“How many people are we willing to sacrifice to vengeance?” Mullin asked. “Is it
175? 176? 177? How many innocent people are enough?”
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2/6/2021 House of Delegates passes bill to abolish Virginia's death penalty; governor expected to sign into law - Daily Press
But lawmakers opposing the measure contended that the victims of heinous crimes
— and their families — are getting lost in the push to end the death penalty. Del.
Jason Miyares, R-Virginia Beach, went one-by-one through a series of crimes,
dramatically holding up the victims’ pictures during the remote legislative session.
“The one thing I rarely hear, and the one word rarely ever uttered, are ‘the
victims,” he said, saying the death penalty is about justice rather than vengeance.
Virginia execution chamber, Gi C Center (Pat Sull ited Press)
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“Tf there’s one word to describe what happened to these victims, it is just ‘cruelty,
Miyares said. “Unimaginable cruelty on a scale that’s hard to even process ... They
did not die with a last meal. They didn’t die with the benefit of seeing their priest or
pastor or rabbi ... They died with sheer terror on their hearts, with people often
taunting them.”
With the first execution at Jamestown more than 400 years ago, Virginia has had
1,390 executions, more than any other state since Colonial times, the Death
Penalty Information Center says.
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2/6/2021 House of Delegates passes bill to abolish Virginia's death penalty; governor expected to sign into law - Daily Press
After a nine-year moratorium on the death penalty ended in 1976, Texas has led
the way with 567 executions — a third of the country’s total since then — followed
by Virginia at 114, Oklahoma at 113 and Florida at 99.
But it’s been a dying punishment in the commonwealth. Nearly four years have
passed since Virginia’s last execution, well shy of the state’s 57 executions between
1995 and 2000. It’s been 10 years since juries handed down the state’s last two
death sentences.
The bill that passed both houses says the only people left on Virginia’s death row —
both convicted in Norfolk capital murder cases — will now get life behind bars.
Those two are Anthony Juniper — sentenced in 2005 for the slaying of former
girlfriend, her brother and her two small children in Norfolk — and Thomas A.
Porter, sentenced in 2007 for killing Norfolk police officer Stanley Cornell Reaves
during a robbery call.
Mullin said he’s proud to represent Virginia’s “historic triangle,” but that it has a
“dark history,” with the first execution at Jamestown in 1608, followed by 1,389
others.
“It’s an ignoble list on which we should be first,” Mullin said, appearing to get
choked up.
Aside from eliminating the chance of a wrongful execution, he said the reasons for
ending the practice “touch on everything from the moral implications ... to the
racial bias and how it’s applied, to its effectiveness, to the extraordinary cost.”
“If we keep the death penalty in place, we are prolonging an expensive, ineffective
and flawed system,” Mullin said, citing a study that says it also doesn’t serve as a
deterrent.
Though Virginia is about 20% African American, Black inmates have accounted for
46% of the 114 people who have been executed statewide since 1976, according to a
database from the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington.
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2/6/2021 House of Delegates passes bill to abolish Virginia's death penalty; governor expected to sign into law - Daily Press
Prosecutors are far more likely to seek death if the victim is white, Mullin said,
adding that of the 1,389 documented executions in Virginia since 1608, only four
were of a white person killing a Black person — the first not until 1997.
“To put it more bluntly ... the death penalty is profoundly racist,” he said.
Miyares, who is running for attorney general, cited what he called “voiceless
victims” who are Black and white. He agreed that the death penalty should be a
rare occurrence, with crucial safeguards in place.
He spoke of Stephanie Sipe, whose boyfriend became enraged when she got
pregnant in 2001 and asked him for child support. “So he hired two killers to come
to her home in Harrisonburg,” Miyares said.
Though Sipe put up a fight, he said, her head was “almost sliced off” from the knife
wounds.
“She had a young toddler,” Miyares said. “Officers ... found bloody footprints all
over the house where the toddler was walking around and sitting and standing next
to his mother’s dead body for hours.”
Then there was Stacie Reed, a 16-year-old killed by Paul Powell in 1999 because
“he had a problem” with the fact that she was dating a Black man.
He tried to rape her, then stabbed her, then “stomped on her throat over and over
again,” until she died, Miyares said. Then, he said, Powell “sat in the living room,
lit a cigarette and got an iced tea,” then raped and stabbed Reed’s 14-year-old sister
when she came home.
Del. Robert Bell, R-Albermarle, added that Powell “wrote taunting letters to the
dead girl’s mother,” including sending a picture of a partially nude woman and
saying it “kind of looks like someone I know.”
Powell was executed in 2010.
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2/6/2021 House of Delegates passes bill to abolish Virginia's death penalty; governor expected to sign into law - Daily Press
Miyares also highlighted Ricky Javon Gray executed in 2017 for killing seven
people over seven days in Richmond. The delegate held up pictures of all seven
victims, including four members of the Harvey family bound and slaughtered in a
Carytown home invasion.
And the delegate spoke of Anthony Juniper, on death row for killing his killing his
ex-girlfriend, Keshia Stephens, in Norfolk, as well as her brother and two
daughters.
“Please do not forget about the victims” who “seem to be absent from these
discussions,” Miyares said.
Under current Virginia law, 15 kinds of slayings qualify for a “capital murder”
prosecution — from murder-for-hire to killing a law enforcement officer to the
killing of a child younger than 14.
Other “capital-eligible” crimes include killing a witness in a pending court case;
killing a judge; killing someone during a robbery, rape or abduction; killing more
than one person over a three-year period; and killing a pregnant woman with the
intent to kill her fetus.
Under the legislation, the “capital murder” list will be renamed “aggravated
murder” — punishable by a life sentence alone. (Lawmakers opposed to the
measure have pointed out that judges can still suspend a life term except for killing
a police officer).
Charniele L. Herring, D-Alexandria, pointed out that many victims’ families
wanted the death penalty abolished, too.
One woman, Rachel Stuphin, whose sheriff's deputy father was killed in the line of
duty in 2006, wrote letters to the entire General Assembly asking lawmakers to
end the practice. Her father’s killer was executed in 2017, and she said that brought
her family no closure, and that the money spent on it could go to helping families.
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2/6/2021 House of Delegates passes bill to abolish Virginia's death penalty; governor expected to sign into law - Daily Press
Herring also said that Virginia’s process for carrying out executions — including
the names of the companies providing the state with the lethal drugs — has long
been improperly shrouded in secrecy.
“Execution at the state’s hands is a public process, and for us to shield it in secrecy,
we cannot constitutionally honestly do this anymore,” she said. “This is just so
simple and so clear. The death penalty is wrong.”
Bell, the Albemarle Republican, agreed that prosecutors should take a victim’s
family’s wishes into “enormous account.”
But this bill, he says, blocks the practice even for those families who fully support
the practice. Under the new law, he said, there are no firm safeguards to ensure
someone getting a life sentence won't get out of prison in the future.
The Greensville Correctional Center, where Virginia's executions have been carried out. (Steve Helber/AP)
Del. Marcus Simon, D-Falls Church, a death penalty opponent, said that vengeance
is “not the proper motivation for criminal justice.”
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2/6/2021 House of Delegates passes bill to abolish Virginia's death penalty; governor expected to sign into law - Daily Press
“I believe that when we engage in the very behavior that we condemn, we degrade
our own morality, our own humanity,” he said. “I can’t wait (move this bill
forward) to make Virginia the first southern state to abolish this barbaric practice.”
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