So let me go ahead and start.
All right.
Yeah.
So like I said, first question is just,
you know, can you tell me your name,
what you're doing right now,
and maybe like a brief summation of,
like what you've done in your career
to get you to this point?
Sure.
My name is Matthew Engel,
and I'm currently an attorney in private practice
in Charlottesville, Virginia.
I'm also a professor at Washington and Lee University School
of Law where I teach, of course,
in the death penalty,
and until recently, directed, co-directed,
along with my partner, the Virginia Capitol Case
Clearing House, which was a clinic that was designed
and whose mission was to assist a defense council
in Capitol cases.
Really, my whole career has been about the death penalty.
I went to law school at Washington and Lee in 1998,
because they had a, they had the Clearing House.
They had a two-year death penalty clinic,
and that's the kind of work that I wanted to do.
I became interested in this area of law,
because I've worked with an inmate population in Ohio,
like Ruben Cleveland, and I worked at a,
sort of a halfway house for people coming out
of the Ohio Penitentiaries,
and really developed some relationships
with people who, you know, the more I learned about them,
could have been death row inmates themselves,
and I was reading about the death penalty,
and thinking a lot about it at the time,
sort of, you know, going through college,
and thinking about the issue,
and it really just never sat right with me,
the idea that some people could be put to death,
and others were not, it all seemed very arbitrary.
And so I came to Washington and Lee,
and I did the clinic for two years,
and then immediately joined the Capitol,
the Virginia Capitol Representation Resource Center
here in Charlottesville, which is a nonprofit law office
that represents death sentence inmates in Virginia
in Hades Corpus Post Conviction Proceedings.
Did that for about seven years,
and then went up to Northern Virginia,
and worked in the Capitol Defender Office up there
for about three years,
and then finally transitioned into teaching,
and ultimately into private practice,
and my wife, Bernadette Dunnevin,
who's my law partner, and I have a small, you know,
boutique firm here in Charlottesville,
we do a lot of, both, had been doing a lot of state
Capitol cases, and, and as well as federal,
which we are continuing to do federal Capitol cases
in our practice.
Sure, so, you know, you mentioned,
you know, dealing with inmates pretty early on
in your career,
a long time focus on the death penalty,
can you just talk a little bit more about
what drew you to that work,
and what has kept you in it, you know, for this long?
Yeah, so interestingly, what,
I think would drew me to it.
For me, I've always been the kind of person
who sees everything in Shades of Grey, you know,
I don't think in absolutes, I don't,
it's just not sort of the way I approach things,
and as I started reading and learning about the death penalty,
and in particular, doing so while I was sort of forming
relationships with people who had committed
really horrible crimes, I mean murders,
and you know, crimes that would be death eligible,
I started to realize that this was an issue
that I actually had very black and white feelings about.
I just felt that this was morally wrong
and that nobody should be judged by their worst conduct
and that nobody deserved to be put to death,
and also that the state didn't deserve to have the power
to decide whether or not somebody should be put to death,
because that's a decision that's always gonna be
infected with human error,
and mistakes are gonna be made.
So to me, ironically, doing capital work
was attractive because my feelings about the subject
were so clear, it was so black and white,
I knew that I could devote myself to capital defense
unreservedly because I'm completely opposed
to the concept of executing someone,
and that was just very attractive to me.
I felt very clear feelings about it,
and that has certainly carried through to the state.
Nothing that I've seen in 20 years now
of death penalty practice makes me feel
any less clear in my feelings against the capital.
Sure.
So in some ways, that kind of black and white
viewing as a death penalty is a double edge sword
because on one side, people can feel very strongly
that the death penalty is appropriate, right?
And in some ways that might have contributed
to the very up-to-battle that people have been fighting
in Virginia for decades, right?
Is that people were committed to the death penalty?
And there wasn't really much,
you could push them towards other than abolishing
the death penalty, right?
So that's one thing, but on the other,
once you flip people, they seem pretty committed
to staying away from the death penalty, right?
Can you talk about the abolition movement
kind of as a whole, and what do you think,
if you have some idea what pushed people
from being pretty committed to the state needs
to kill these people, to maybe we shouldn't be doing this,
dude, like a catalyst and an event,
whatever it might have been.
Yeah, I think I'm probably a number of catalysts.
So it's hard to point to anyone.
What I'll say is, I think you're right
about the intensity of people's feelings on both sides
of this issue, and I've certainly seen that,
and my work is that there are a lot of people,
even today, who very strongly support the death penalty,
and I think we need it.
I lost my train of thought.
There was a reason I brought that up.
I don't remember what it was.
It's okay.
Anyway, it's probably not important.
As I said, I think a lot of people feel very strongly
that it's important that we have the death penalty,
and I sort of get emotionally,
I sort of get where they're coming from.
You read about some of these crimes,
and you put yourself in the victim's shoes,
and you think, what would I want to happen
if that happened to my daughter, or my son,
or my wife, or whoever, you know, I don't wanna kill that.
I would wanna kill that person.
I would wanna hurt that.
That is, I think, a very normal human impulse
that all of us have.
And so it is hard to change minds about that,
because it's hard to get people out of that mindset.
And I think, again, as I said,
I think that's a totally understandable impulse to have.
But what I think more than any one particular catalyst,
I think there were a sort of a series of developments
that he wrote that sort of sentiment
about meeting the death penalty.
And what, you know, for one, I think,
major example of that is groups like BADP,
supported the creation of life without parole
as an alternative.
I mean, the name of the organization
is Virginia's for alternatives to the death penalty, right?
The alternative to the death penalty
became life without the possibility of parole.
And it has consistently been true
that when you offer jurors,
and when you offer citizens, options,
short of the death penalty,
that they feel are going to be enough
to ensure their safety.
And to make sure that people are paying
an appropriately severe punishment for their crimes,
they will choose that option.
And I think that that, I mean,
the abolition of parole, in many ways,
I think was a horrible mistake.
It was sort of a deep bargain we made with the devil
in this case to achieve a greater good.
We now have this horrible sentence of life without parole.
I have very mixed feelings about that,
because on one hand,
I don't think we ever would have gotten rid of the death penalty
if we didn't have life without parole as an option.
On the other hand, I really think life without parole
is also an inhumane sentence,
and that we pretty immediately need to start pivoting
into getting rid of, of locking people up
and throwing the key away without ever considering
whether they're able to be released back into society safely.
So I think that was a huge development.
And then I also just think,
in terms of a catalyst,
the other thing that really happened in Virginia
is that the members of the Capitol Defense community
were so successful in stopping the implementation
of new death sentences,
getting the quality of representation
increased dramatically in Virginia
to where even though the state continued
to seek death sentences, they couldn't get them.
They couldn't get them.
And we didn't have a new death sentence in Virginia
for a decade leading up to abolition this year.
That's a direct result of the improvement
in Capitol Defense representation.
So that was the other catalyst that I saw.
It became, I think, pretty obvious to everyone
that this was a system that was just wasteful
and unnecessary.
We were spending millions and millions of dollars
every year in Virginia on maintaining the death penalty,
and getting, even if you support the death penalty,
getting zero return for that money
because we just weren't putting people on death row anymore.
So I would say that those are the catalysts that I see.
Sure.
And you mentioned earlier,
just in your career,
you've been a part of what you call
the Capitol Defense community for quite some time.
What, as someone who has spent their career,
the better part of the career,
working on this stuff.
What did it feel like when you saw the writing on the wall?
And then when you actually heard,
hey, we don't have the death penalty in Virginia anymore.
What was that like?
Yeah, I didn't, I never actually saw the writing on the wall.
I did not think Virginia was poised to abolish
the death penalty this soon.
I was more pessimistic than a lot of my colleagues.
I thought it was going to take.
I thought the writing was on the wall very, very faintly.
I thought five years from now, a decade from now,
that was a realistic goal to be working towards.
But I didn't see it happening as quickly as it did happen.
So I can't really say that I saw the writing on the wall.
But just in recent years,
we just started seeing traction on some bills,
in the general assembly that previously we weren't getting traction on,
things like exempting people with severe mental illness
from the death penalty.
That was a big focus of VADP's legislative efforts
and a lot of our partners' efforts
in pushing those bills to the general assembly.
And they started to get a lot of votes and committees
and really getting some interest from legislators.
Legislators, excuse me.
And that, to me, was the first sort of inkling
that things that maybe we didn't think were politically
possible right now actually were.
And then, yeah, I was sort of taken aback
as many people were, the speed with which it happened this last year.
And it was sort of stunning.
I tried a capital case in October of last year,
not knowing it.
And hindsight, that turned out to be the last Virginia capital murder case
because we don't have capital murder anymore.
We have something called aggravated murder now.
At the time, we had no idea it was going to be the last capital murder case,
but it turned out to be.
So in that span between October and what, January, February,
when we really started seeing the general assembly in action,
the whole world sort of changed.
And it absolutely makes your head spin to see how quickly that all came together.
And that's because of years and years of hard work by advocacy groups
and people who wanted to see this happen.
It appears that it happened overnight, but I know that it really didn't.
This was a result of a lot of people's efforts over many, many years.
Sure.
So you can actually add advocacy groups and people doing this kind of work.
And that kind of brings us directly to VADP.
Right.
What's your relationship with VADP?
You've been like, can you talk about your experience?
As you've been doing this work in your career, maybe separate from VADP,
how of those worlds kind of come up.
So yeah, I was recruited onto the VADP board.
I'm not going to remember exactly what year, but it probably would have been
around 2011 or 2012 by John Scheldon, who was the board president at the time.
And John is also, in addition to being a long time VADP supporter,
is also a member of the capital defense community.
He does a lot of capital cases and post-convictions.
So I knew him sort of professionally and personally,
we were friends and he reached out to me and asked what I'd be willing to join the board.
I had worked with VADP prior to that, especially around,
when one of my clients at the research center would have an execution day,
we would coordinate sort of publicity measures and media campaigns.
And we would work with VADP to make sure they were up to date on what was going on.
And so I certainly knew about the important work of the organization,
but that's how I got directly involved.
And it was John sort of recruiting me.
And then very shortly after he recruited me,
he left the board and nominated me to fill his position as board chair,
which I agreed to do.
And in hindsight, it was probably wildly inappropriate,
because I had essentially no idea what I was doing.
I'd never served any kind of board before.
This really wasn't my forte.
I came to this from a defense attorney background,
not a board chair background.
But I was incredibly fortunate to be surrounded by some incredibly dedicated
and talented and brilliant board members.
And executive directors, at the time, Steve Northerp,
who I don't think anybody thinks we could be where we are today,
sitting here doing this interview about the abolition of the death penalty,
if Steve Northerp hadn't spent years stewarding VADP for free,
dedicating his time to this cause that he really believed in.
And so when I became board chair, Steve was of a volunteer executive director.
And the board was made up of people like Beth Panelitis,
and when I'll Patterson, people from all sorts of different backgrounds
who each sort of had their own reason for having the feelings
that they did about the issue.
And I was just very, very fortunate to serve
with some incredibly dedicated and talented people.
And I can't pretend that my time on the board was marked by any spectacular achievements.
But with one major exception, which is that we hired Michael Stone
to take over as a full-time executive director.
And I think obviously that turned out to be the right man at the right time.
It was Michael took over the VADP,
and you can just sort of see how the organization has grown since then
and where he's taken it.
So that's my involvement with the board.
Sure.
So switching gears back a little bit more to your own practice, your career.
Is there any event that doesn't have to be a case or anything?
We're just something kind of in your career as it relates to the death penalty
that kind of sticks out in your mind.
Like this was an important moment for me.
You know, as it relates to the death penalty,
it doesn't have to really be related to VADP directly.
But is there just something that kind of through the course of your career?
Like this was an important moment for me personally.
Yeah, there are a lot of them.
The things that immediately come to mind,
you know, when I sort of reflect back on the last couple decades,
at the executions, obviously, I've had clients who were executed,
who I represented in post-conviction and being at Greensville
in what they call LUnit and spending my clients last hours with them.
It's something I think about all the time.
And particularly right now, when I think we're all feeling incredible sort of exhilaration
and joy about Virginia's abolition of the death penalty,
I've also been spending a lot of time thinking about the people who were executed.
And how just how pointless that was.
You know, how completely pointless it was that we took these men and one woman in the modern era
and put them to death.
It achieved nothing.
You know, the world would be no safer if Michael Lenz and Dexter Vincent and Scott Emmett
and Paul Powell were still living and still serving life without parole prison senses.
We'd be no safer.
And just what an incredible loss and a pointless loss that was.
So that's definitely something that stands out to me.
And then the other things that stand up to me are seeing people like
Shermaine Johnson, who I represented, who was on death row and is now serving a life sentence.
And Justin Wolff, who is on death row and is now in prison, but has a release date.
You know, and is going to be getting out someday.
Seeing men who society had written off at one time, who now have lives.
And being able to see what they're doing with their lives, because they're contributing.
They're value, they're valuable people.
They're loved by their family.
They have friends.
They're accomplishing things.
They're going to school.
They're learning.
They're improving themselves.
To me, that is something that stands out as well and sort of reinforces my belief that
we did the right thing by getting rid of the death penalty.
So I think that's not really an event, I guess, but that's something, you know, for me,
thinking about the death penalty is no longer sort of an, it's no longer an abstraction.
It's not an issue.
I think about the people.
I think about my clients, who my representative, both, you know, successfully and unsuccessfully.
Where they are now.
That's really beautiful.
So you mentioned a little bit, you know, going forward.
We need to shift gears.
You know, we abolished the death penalty.
You mentioned, you know, life without roles, probably the next step.
You know, in a nutshell, where do we go from here?
Right?
What's the next step?
I really do think that's the next step.
So it's kind of funny, the clinic, the Virginia Capital Place clearinghouse that I went to
as a law student and then helped run this last year because the David Brock, who had been
running it, quote unquote, retired, which means he went to Rontano Bay to represent people
facing potential distances down there.
It's not any normal definition of retirement, but anyway, that's a bit of an aside.
That clinic, because of the waning need for capital defense support, had begun incorporating
parole representation into the clinic.
And so I spent the last year, along with my partner, supervising eight law students who
were advocating before the Virginia Paral Board on behalf of these are old law inmates,
people who have been in prison since before 1995, and therefore are still parole eligible
and trying to convince the parole board to let them out.
And so that issue now, to me, that's a very natural transition.
I mean, what I have seen through my work with the parole board is that people age out of
violence.
And this is the number one change that I would make now that the death penalty is gone and
the criminal justice system is the recognition that people age out of violence, people mature,
people grow.
And once you hit a certain age in your mid-40s or early 50s, there's almost no chance
that you're going to be violent, whether you're in prison or out of prison.
Old people aren't violent people.
That's the reality.
And there are so many people sitting in prison who have been in for decades, who pose no
risk, who have truly worked on rehabilitating themselves, who've taken classes, who've
gotten jobs, who've taken all sorts of measures to improve themselves.
And they're ready to come out.
They can come out.
They have served decades.
They have served incredible amounts of time, for very serious crimes, but public safety
doesn't demand keeping them in anymore.
And frankly, it's immoral to keep people in prison.
It's also hugely wasteful and inefficient and a poor use of our resources to keep non-violent
people locked up for decades and decades.
And I think that that needs to be the next fight that we have in Virginia is not just
bringing back parole, because I think I do think we need to do that.
I think it makes no sense not to have a parole board that can evaluate inmate individual
assessments and determine does this person need to be incarcerated any longer, or is it safe
and appropriate to let them out at this time?
I think that's absolutely necessary.
But overall, we just need to get away from this idea in society that longer and longer
prison sentences are our answer.
I think it is important that we have accountability and law enforcement and that people who commit
serious crimes are prosecuted for those crimes and often need to go to prison for long periods
of time.
I don't disagree with any of that.
But I think what would make the bigger difference is making sure that we solve crimes and hold
people accountable in the hour, but then also that we're not needlessly incarcerating
people long past the point where we need to do that anymore.
That's kind of a rambling answer.
But I think that's what I'm trying to say is that I really think the next fight is about
re-evaluating our approach to incarceration and recognizing that there's just a lot of
people behind bars who don't need to be behind bars anymore.
And what can we do as a society to get them out and get them back into society to become
contributing members?
That's great.
I don't know that much else beyond the last question just about what do you want to
say to the people that are going to be viewing this at this VADP luncheon?
Is there anything else you want to say about VADP or career or your work with the death
of the community or anything?
I don't think so.
I didn't come in with a list of things to say.
I think I'm just probably just repeating myself.
The thing about VADP that I really value is the diversity of it.
How many different people from different backgrounds and different walks of life came together
around this one issue.
And that I think was vital to achieve the end of the VADP achieved.
We needed to be able to craft a message that appealed to people across the political spectrum
and with a lot of different backgrounds in order to convince people that this was the
right thing to do.
So yeah, and I think I've already probably expressed that.
I don't think I have anything else to add.
Sure.
Like I said, this last question, if you feel comfortable, if it doesn't feel awkward, you
can look at the camera just because this is more so rather than you talking to me or
about something that's more so you talking to the people at this luncheon.
It's supposed to be a gathering for VADP celebration, abolition, all that.
But it's essentially just like, what if anything do you have to say to the people that are
there?
Thank you, nice work, whatever it is.
Yeah, I mean, I think that the number one thing that I would want to say to supporters
of VADP and people who are attending this celebration is thank you.
We wouldn't be sitting here doing this interview if it weren't for your efforts and your support
of this organization.
A lot of us who were in the trenches on this issue for most of our careers are just amazed
at how quickly this all happened and it certainly makes your head spin and also makes you think,
how am I going to be paying the bills going forward?
But the truth is it didn't really happen all that suddenly.
It happened because people like you supported this organization for decades and major voices
heard and stood up for what you felt was right.
And it wasn't always a popular cause, but we really managed to change public opinion and
to change the way that Virginians think about this issue.
And ultimately, change the general assembly and elect people who were not afraid to cast
the right vote, whether it was going to be politically popular or not.
So your support was indispensable in making that happen and I would just like to say congratulations
and thank you very much.
Awesome.
All right.
I think we're good.
