2/12/2021 Virginia is poised to eliminate the death penalty | Richmond Free Press | Serving the African American Community in Richmond, VA
Virginia is poised to eliminate the death penalty
Jeremy M. Lazarus | 2/11/2021, 6 p.m.
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2/12/2021 Virginia is poised to eliminate the death penalty | Richmond Free Press | Serving the African American Community in Richmond, VA
Governor Northam
The death penalty has been a staple of Virginia law since the first English settlers arrived in
Jamestown.
But more than 412 years after an English ship’s captain became the first person to be put to
death in Virginia for spying for Spain, the death knell is ringing for the death penalty itself.
With the governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general cheering them on, members of
the General Assembly are hustling to eliminate the increasingly unpopular ultimate punishment
that has long been regarded as a tool of racial oppression.
In historic actions — a 21-17 vote in the state Senate on Feb. 3and then in a 57-41 vote in the
House of Delegates on Feb. 5 — the legislature put itself on record to abolish Virginia’s death
penalty that once had huge support as a crime deterrent but now is derided as an extension of
lynching.
With slight variations, the approved bills would eliminate capital punishment and replace death
with a life sentence from which the convicted could not be paroled, a move some political
analysts are describing as a watershed moment for a state that has been a national leader in
executions.
Both houses still must reconcile their differences and pass a final version that can head to
Gov. Ralph S. Northam for his signature. The governor submitted the initial bill and has
promised to sign the finished product when it reaches his desk. Through his intervention, the
legislature has been granted 16 additional days to get through the final procedural hurdles on
that bill and such equally high-profile bills including legalizing personal marijuana use and
providing for the expungement of criminal records.
With final passage, Virginia would join 22 other states that already have done away with the
death penalty and become the first former Confederate state to do so, according to national
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2/12/2021 Virginia is poised to eliminate the death penalty | Richmond Free Press | Serving the African American Community in Richmond, VA
data.
A signal of the political change that has washed over the once stalwart conservative state, the
vote also reflects the waning support for capital punishment among the public and among
prosecutors. According to abolition advocates, who had been building momentum for decades,
two events made this possible.
First, Democrats who already were in control of the governor’s mansion and more supportive
of abolition, won the majority of seats in both the House and Senate in 2019.
Then, amid the pandemic came the Black Lives Matter demonstrations and marches for racial
justice in 2020 following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Richmond became
the center of the Virginia protests that ultimately eliminated most of the racist Confederate
statues that had dominated the landscape, put police brutality in the spotlight and made the
government put top priority on criminal justice reform to end racial disparities.
The Rev. LaKeisha Cook, a justice reform advocate with the Virginia Interfaith Center for
Public Policy, said those protests, along with the federal government's spate of executions in
the final months of the Trump administration, pushed “racial justice issues and capital
punishment to the forefront of people’s minds and conversations.”
Michael Stone, executive director of Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, which has
been working for abolition for 30 years, also credits the wave of racial justice protests with
giving the final push for this change.
The protests appear to have influenced Gov. Northam, who has been seeking to make
amends since facing accusations early in his term of wearing blackface as a medical student
30 years ago.
While he did not mention the Black Lives Matter movement, Gov. Northam used his State of
the Commonwealth address to announce his support and became the first governor to submit
legislation to eliminate death sentences.
He, like others, noted that the death penalty does not deter murder, reduce crime or bring
closure to families of victims.
While removing the death penalty from state law would be huge, Mr. Stone and others noted
that the death penalty essentially has been repealed in actual practice.
In most localities in Virginia, prosecutors do not seek the death penalty and the last conviction
on a capital charge anywhere in the state occurred nine years ago.
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2/12/2021 Virginia is poised to eliminate the death penalty | Richmond Free Press | Serving the African American Community in Richmond, VA
The greater expense has been a deterrent, according to advocates. So has the state’s
creation of regional capital defender offices that have provide defendants with better legal
representation, making it harder to get a death conviction. A state Supreme Court decision
also requires prosecutors to tell juries that the alternative to the death penalty is life
imprisonment.
Currently, two men are awaiting execution in Virginia, Anthony B. Juniper, 49, who was
convicted in 2005 of killing four people in Norfolk, and Thomas A. Palmer, 45, who was
convicted in 2007 of killing a Norfolk police officer.
Since Virginia became a colony, nearly 1,400 people have been executed in the
Commonwealth, including 113 since 1976 when the death penalty was reinstated by the U.S.
Supreme Court. During the Jim Crow era, historical records show that Black people were
particularly targets of state retribution.
Between 1900 and the early 1970s when the nation’s highest court temporarily suspended
capital punishment after finding it was used unfairly, Virginia executed 73 Black people for
crimes other than murder, including rape, attempted rape and robbery that did not involve
death. No white people convicted of those charges were sentenced to death.
Heightened awareness of the role that race plays in death sentences has quietly gained public
attention, with polls showing public support for the death penalty falling by 25 percentage
points.
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