3/27/2021 Williams: We've abolished the death penalty. Let's abolish injustice in criminal justice. | Crime-and-courts | richmond.com
Williams: We've abolished the death penalty. Let's abolish
injustice in criminal justice.
Michael Paul Williams Mar 26, 2021
Gov. Ralph Northam signed the death penalty abolition bill at Greensville Correctional Center.
Daniel Sangjib Min/TIMES-DISPATCH
Michael Paul Williams
For seven years, Evans Hopkins lived above the death chamber of the Virginia State
Penitentiary in Richmond, where he was serving a life sentence dispensed by an all-
white Danville jury for armed robbery.
3/27/2021 Williams: We've abolished the death penalty. Let's abolish injustice in criminal justice. | Crime-and-courts | richmond.com
This proximity compelled him to write about the executions for publications like The
Washington Post. He said a prison trustee slipped him a copy of the execution manual
detailing protocols for killing men — instructions and timetables for “tightening the
chest belt” and “attaching electrode cuff or cutting a pants leg off “before applying
sponges soaked in saline solutions, to keep skin from singeing and causing the room to
smell of burning flesh, once the electricity is turned on.”
“Imagine. Having them KILL someone. In the basement. Below you. And knowing just
how they were going about it,” said Hopkins, who was paroled in 1997 and since has
published his memoir, “Life After Life: A Story of Rage and Redemption.”
Virginia is basking in a sense of redemption days after Gov. Ralph Northam, following
the lead of Virginia lawmakers, abolished the death penalty. But Hopkins waxed more
introspective than celebratory Friday.
“] think that this is a time for reflection,” he said. “We cannot become congratulatory. Or
complacent. Virginia should now help lead. Governor Northam spoke of leading
nationally, on equity, so now's his chance.”
Some families who’ve lost a loved one to violence might be feeling betrayal. But this
much is certain: No true justice can flow from an inherently unjust system.
The death penalty, in Virginia and beyond, disproportionately has been meted out to
Black and poor defendants, who are more likely to die if their victims were white. The
innocent have been caught up in the death machine. Earl Washington, wrongfully
convicted of rape and murder, came within nine days of execution.
From 1900 until 1977, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared the death penalty
unconstitutional for crimes in which no one was killed, Virginia executed 73 such
defendants, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. That number would
include the Martinsville 7, all convicted of rape. No white defendants were similarly
executed.
Virginia, the state with the longest history of execution, second only to Texas in its zeal
to kill in the modern death penalty era, is the first state in the South to abolish it.
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3/27/2021 Williams: We've abolished the death penalty. Let's abolish injustice in criminal justice. | Crime-and-courts | richmond.com
“It was not very long ago that the thought of achieving death penalty abolition in
Virginia seemed very out of touch with the political climate,” said Marc Mauer, former
executive director of The Sentencing Project, based in Washington, D.C. “But given
developments on racial justice over the past year, along with the newly energized
Virginia legislature and governor, the pace of reform has picked up quickly. While other
Southern states have resisted calls for change, the Virginia developments could serve as
a roadmap for the first significant opening in the political environment in those states as
well.”
Georgia seemed poised to join Virginia as the next progressive Southern state before its
lawmakers went Jim Crow 2.0 and began dreaming up voter suppression schemes.
Still, this has been a heady few days for me that began this past Saturday with a virtual
Richmond Forum featuring lawyer and social justice activist Bryan Stevenson. (I
moderated the Q&A.)
Stevenson is the founder of the Montgomery, Ala.-based Equal Justice Initiative (EJD,
which provides legal representation to the poor, the poorly represented or the
wrongfully convicted. The latter include Walter McMillian, an Alabama man wrongfully
convicted of murder and sentenced to death before EJI worked to obtain his freedom, as
detailed in Stevenson’s memoir and the 2019 film, “Just Mercy.”
His great-grandparents were enslaved in Caroline County. “My grandmother fled
Virginia when lynchings came through that area. So Virginia is a state very acquainted
with all of the horrors of this long history. And I see the death penalty as lynching’s
stepchild,” said Stevenson, whose EJI created The National Museum for Peace and
Justice to commemorate lynching. “And so to reject it, to turn it away, is a really
important step. But, I think there is obviously a lot more to do.”
It was barely a dozen years ago that folks were doing collective high-fives about how
we'd become a “post-racial” nation. How’s that looking now?
3/27/2021 Williams: We've abolished the death penalty. Let's abolish injustice in criminal justice. | Crime-and-courts | richmond.com
“It’s fragile,” Stevenson said of post-death penalty Virginia. “There will be a test, there
will be a challenge. Somebody will commit a crime, and somebody will say ‘We need to
bring back the death penalty.’ And there will be that threat. That’s why it’s still
unstable.”
There are no victory laps in the race toward social justice; only moments of rest and
replenishment. We’ve abolished the death penalty; let’s keep chiseling away at other
unjust systems.
If we're to seize on this moment and build on it, there must be life after death.
