All right, we are now reporting.
They're probably not going to use it, my voice and any of it.
So if you'll let me ask a question, maybe give it a second and then start talking.
Again, that's fine.
We can get rolling.
So the first one is just going to be, tell me about yourself.
What are you doing right now and kind of what led you to this point?
Well, I'm Steve Northam and I'm a retired partner from the law firm of Trotten, Pepper
or the Richmond Office of Trotten, Pepper, where I practice for almost 40 years.
Right now I'm doing pro bono work in my retirement as a retired partner.
The firm supports me in it.
And in my pro bono work, I mostly work as had prisoners and prior prisoners either before
the parole board or occasionally on a petition for a conditional pardon to the governor.
A couple of wrongful conviction cases, although those are mostly over with by now.
But really trying to do my part to deal with the problem of having too many people in
prison in our country and trying to get as many of them as possible, who should be out,
who have served their sentences, would be no risk to public safety.
And are eligible for parole, for example, and should be released.
Just to put it so parole.
So you mentioned wrongful conviction.
How does that kind of interact with the death penalty?
How did it interact in Virginia?
How does it interact at the federal level?
Yeah, that's a good question.
I think it was a significant factor in the effort to end the death penalty.
That is, the phenomenon of wrongful convictions and the realization that the legal system,
the criminal justice system can make mistakes.
And there have been, I lost track now, I think over 130 exonerations off of death row in the
United States since the mid 70s.
That's an amazing statistic.
These are people who got convicted and got sentenced to death.
And were due to be executed.
And it turned out they were innocent and had not committed the crime at all.
We've had one set of cases in Virginia that we know about.
And so you're watching in case, which was a very significant case.
Or actually came with the days of being executed before folks who were working on his case,
were able to find out what else to represent it.
So, and I think that the possibility of making an irrevocable mistake was a significant
factor in being able to persuade folks that we ought not to be, we ought not to be using
the death penalty.
It ought to be something that comes off the table as far as our criminal law system is concerned.
Awesome.
So I'm going to shift, redirect you a little bit to specifically Virginians for alternatives
to the death penalty.
Tell me about how you first got involved with that organization and then your time as a board member
and then the executive director.
Yeah, there's a bit of a story here.
Back in, sometime in the mid-80s, there were two very high profile, there were a lot of
executions in the mid-80s in Virginia.
Virginia was next to Texas has been the most active and actually killing people from
death row.
And there were a lot of executions in the mid-80s and two of the most high profile ones were
the Bradley brothers, Lynn Wood and James Bradley and they were notorious, I guess, bad guys
would be the right word.
I mean, they killed a lot of people in the Richmond area.
It was certainly, there was a lot of publicity about them about their case.
They actually were among the crew that escaped from death row when it was in Mecklenburg.
I think that was 1984.
That further raised the profile of their cases.
So my wife and I were down at the time, at the time the executions were being done at what
we call Sprink Street, which was the old state pen down on Belvedere, right across the
street from Oregon Hill.
And we were down there protesting doing some sort of a candlelight protest.
There were supporters of executing the person across the street coming from Oregon Hill.
And my wife and I ran into Chris and Jack Paden-Travars.
Chris is an Episcopal priest.
Jack is a refugee from the 60s.
He's an activist and we became friends.
And obviously we were all four of us.
We're opposed to capital punishment.
But VADP was formed, I think, in the late 80s.
I'm not going to be accurate on the actual dates.
And as soon as it got organized, I made contributions to the organization.
This was when Henry Heller was the executive director, Henry from Charlottesville.
And I made contributions to the organization.
Actually, they had an annual dinner.
And my wife and I went to the annual dinner one year up in Charlottesville.
I do remember that.
But at some point, Jack Paden-Travars became the executive director of VADP.
And Jack and I are really good friends.
So I offered to go on the board as a means of supporting him.
He was looking for board members.
So I went on to the board.
And I was on the board for several years.
Jack was succeeded by Beth Panellitis, whom I think you're going to interview also.
And that was a real crucial time in the history of VADP.
At some point, well, Jack was executive director.
And probably prior to Jack becoming executive director, VADP was largely a protest organization.
VADP supporters would come to executions.
They would do vigils.
They would argue against the death penalty, talk of churches, so on and so forth.
But there wasn't really a significant lobbying effort in the Virginia General Assembly to
impact laws that relate to Capitol Punishment.
That change when John Schelton became chairman of the board of VADP.
He wanted VADP to be a much more serious organization that would do grassroots organizing that
would ultimately be able to lobby the General Assembly to stop expanding Capitol Punishment.
That is adding to the categories of crimes that qualify as for Capitol Punishment and maybe
start to eliminate or reduce the number of crimes that qualify for Capitol Punishment.
And of course, ultimately, this poor fruit in the lobbying effort that led to just this
past year, the abolition of the death penalty in Virginia.
So that started, that change in VADP started sometime in the 90s, I think.
I would say, or late-dandies, I'm not real clear on my chronology here.
But that was a real significant turning point in history of the organization when we got
serious about moving from being a primarily a protest organization to a law-changing organization.
Awesome.
That's a really helpful timeline.
So you mentioned, you know, kind of how you ended up on the board.
And you talk about how you jumped to executive director?
Yeah.
At a certain point, so when I was on the board and John was chair, we got, we never, I mean,
Henry Hellert took no salary when he was executive director.
Jack took a patents, Jack Payne-Tarver's didn't take much of anything.
And we didn't have the money to pay him.
But we got a grant.
And I don't remember where we got the grant.
But it was enough money to hire a real executive director and we hired Beth, who was just
out of graduate school, I think.
She came from the wingman.
Here's a small world story.
When Beth applied for the job, I can't remember how we found this out when I say, we, I mean
my wife and me.
When she was in college or graduate school, she interned at a housing organization that
was being run by our Goddard in Connecticut.
And so, and our Goddard was Kate Kelly and Kate knew Beth very well.
And it spoke very highly of her.
It was pretty easy to pick up the phone and call Kate and say, tell us about Beth.
You know, tell me about Beth.
She's applied for a job down here at an organization I'm on the board of.
And Kate, I mean Kate just gushed about what a person Beth is and she is.
And she was a dynamic and game-changing executive director.
And she fit right in with the effort to make the organization have a slightly different
focus.
And that was good for her.
She was really good at that stuff.
But we ran out of money again.
I mean, the grant ran out.
We couldn't get it renewed.
Basically, the treasury was empty.
So Beth had to leave because she needed a job to support herself.
She went to another organization.
And right at about the time that I retired, had a retire from my law firm partnership,
we were out of money, Beth had left.
I agreed to be a volunteer executive director until such time as we could raise enough money
to be able to hire somebody.
I didn't really want to do the job.
That's not the kind of thing I'm good at.
And I mean, I'm good at lobby.
I'm good at meeting with members of the general assembly, but I'm not good at organizational
development.
Which is, you need somebody who's good at that.
So one of the things I was able to accomplish was I got a grant.
I got another grant.
And we got a pretty good one this time.
And it lasted for a few years.
And so we formed a search committee.
And we actually got several applications, one of which was for Michael Stone, who had worked
for years with the Catholic diocese of Richmond in their office of justice and peace, was very
much opposed to the death penalty, had a lot of good relationships within the Catholic
church.
Which proved very beneficial because it turns out that a lot of Catholics are conservative
Republicans.
And despite the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, which the teaching is, you shouldn't
be doing the death penalty, a lot of Catholics supported.
So Michael, I always like to say, Michael knows how to talk with the public.
And so he became the executive director and really did a good job at that.
One of the things he focused on was trying to reach out to Republican members of the
general assembly who might be persuaded to change their minds and oppose the death penalty.
And he did.
I mean, he got another grant eventually and hired Dale Brumfeld to be a field organizer.
And Dale and Michael together really spirited into the effort to lobby the general assembly
and to build support for ending Catholic punishment.
Awesome.
So this could be a very related question.
But outside of your time, specifically with the VADP, what capacity were you involved in
the movement for abolition of the death penalty?
You mentioned starting now with protests.
Was there anything in your line of employment just separate from VADP that you had involved?
Yeah, starting in the late 80s, I took so in the 80s.
When, excuse me.
In the 80s, when someone in Virginia got sentenced to death, the next step in the legal process
would be to challenge the fairness of their conviction and desense.
And the way you do that is through habeas corpus, what is supposed to be a conviction
proceeding.
And there was no right to counsel.
There still is no right to counsel in habeas corpus proceedings, even for people on death
row, although that almost changed at one point here in Virginia.
And we relied on Virginia relied upon volunteer attorneys to represent and make
arrangements on death row in pursuing habeas corpus challenges to their convictions and
desenses.
And there was a woman here in Virginia who was sent here by the Southern Coalition on
Jails and Prisons in the 80s.
She came in the 80s.
Her name is Marie Deans.
Unfortunately, Marie died several years ago.
She died at cancer.
She was a hugely significant person in fighting against the death penalty in Virginia.
She was recruiting lawyers and I had gotten to know Marie.
I can't remember exactly how I got to know her, but I offered to take a case.
And so I took one case and we challenged the conviction and desense.
We lost.
Our client was executed in 1991.
I say, we, I had a co-counsel named Christopher Lone, who's a lawyer in Richmond and a good
friend of mine.
And then I took another case a couple of years later and we lost that case as well.
So I did those two cases.
Went to protests, wrote letters to the editor, wrote a couple of op-eds.
But I was doing that partly while I was on the board or while I was executive director.
I was doing that also.
But just stayed in touch with, always went to visuals on the night of an execution.
The visuals, often were at Richmond Friends meeting.
Sometimes they were in a Catholic church, St. Peter's downtown, right across from Capitol
Square.
And so there's a whole network of people, not just in the Richmond area, but throughout
the state.
They had opposed Capitol Post, but we're very instrumental in editing the practice because
of their support for the ADP.
Very, very cool.
So you mentioned the visuals kind of where they were.
Can you say a little bit more about who organized what kind of went on there?
Yeah.
There were in the Richmond area, there were primarily, and maybe overlooking an organization or two,
but there were primarily two organizations that organized execution visuals.
One was the Richmond Friends meeting.
Most of the people who have been in Richmond Friends meeting, they're Quakers.
They're opposed to Catholic punishment.
And the other is a Catholic piece of justice organization called Pox Christi and consists
of a number of Catholics from churches in the Richmond area.
And Pox Christi also helped to organize these visuals.
And so typically it was often a prayer service or reflections, candles, moments of silence,
that's what the visuals consisted of.
And they were scheduled to coincide with the schedule time for execution.
And I think a couple of times we read the names of all of those.
We read the names of those who have been executed in the names of their victims, both.
And we prayed for all of them.
Thank you for that.
I think we're going to move on a little bit from kind of that topic.
And then I alluded to this before we started.
Significant personal memory of Venn.
It could be one of the visuals if that's the case.
But just kind of in your involvement in the abolition movement, do you have a person
and interaction event that really sticks out to you?
Yeah, there are two in particular.
One involved the execution of my first death row client.
He was executed in July of 1991.
And Chris Malone and my co-counsel when I spent that day with him in the death house,
he was the first Virginia prisoner to be executed at Greensville Correctional Center.
They moved the death house from Spring Street in Richmond to Greensville, which is down
in Greensville County, close to Jared, Virginia.
So our client went, his name was Albert Cosa, C-L-O-Z-E-A.
Albert was moved there, had to spend the last couple of weeks there.
There were no more legal appeals at that point.
He did not, he specifically did not want to ask the governor for a part.
And this is going to be a little longer than I anticipated.
Albert went through a real transformation while he was on death row.
When I first met him, when we started to represent him, it almost looked like he was sprung
out on drugs, meth or something like that.
He was just wired.
And gradually over the two years or so, the Chris and I represented him, he seemed to
make, he stopped that.
That kind of gradually went away and he seemed to make peace with his own predicament.
So that by the time of the execution, the 90th of the day and the evening of the execution,
he was as much as you can imagine a person at peace with what was going to happen to
him.
There was a chaplain at that time who was a southern Baptist, a good southern Baptist
white guy.
And Albert was white as it turned out.
That's just coincidental.
He named Russ Ford, who ministered to the people on death row.
And Russ spent, came at some point that day and spent the afternoon and the evening with
Albert and with us in the death house.
Albert had been raised Catholic.
And but that didn't make any difference to him that Russ was Baptist and it didn't make
any difference to Russ.
And at some point, so Albert is in this little holding cell and we're standing outside the
holding cell.
And Russ said to Albert, would you like to do a UGRST?
Albert said, yeah, I really would.
So Russ led a UGRST celebration.
He didn't have wine, but he had bread.
He was allowed to bring bread in.
And it consisted of prayers followed by the blessing of the bread and then the distribution
of the bread.
And the guards were there with us in the death house.
I mean, they were around.
They were there.
They were present.
And Russ, at one point, invited the guards, said, would you like to come and join us?
Two of the guards came over and we stood in a circle with Albert and prayed, we held
hands.
And the guards were two of the people who were in that circle.
It was one of the most moving experiences of my entire life.
And there after Albert had specifically asked that Chris and I not witness, so we weren't
on the list of people who could witness his execution.
He had specifically asked that we not do so.
So Chris and I laughed, Russ stayed.
And then when Russ came out after the execution was over, he described what had happened.
And he said his last memory was as he was hit the lead Albert side and he was out by
the door.
And he looked back at Albert and he gave him a thumbs up and Albert gave him a thumbs
up with both hands.
And then they killed him.
He was electrocuted.
He was not killed by a nasal injection.
So the other memory is, and I may be conflated to two memories here, the visuals that used
to be held at Sprung Street on the night of an execution eventually got moved down the
Greenfield and we were allowed to congregate in a field several hundred yards from the
prison.
We didn't even see the prison.
We could just see the lights from the prison when we were down there.
And the night of Virginia's hundredth execution there was a large crowd down there because
that was a milestone, so to speak.
And I was actually executive director at that point.
And so I was down there and it was a lot of press because it was the hundredth.
And several of us got interviewed.
There were interviews were broadcast on news stations.
I got a call from a guy in New Army who was a lawyer up in Michigan who was looking at
his local news and he saw me interviewed on his news broadcast.
And he looked me up and got my phone number and called me.
That was an interesting experience.
That night it was quite a milestone too.
It was a big crowd.
Eventually the number of people who would drive all the way down to Greenfield for a visual
shrank because it was a big effort.
I mean it's 45 minutes south of Richmond and you go out in this field.
It's one of the reasons Virginia moved the death house.
To such a remote location as they didn't want to publicity.
You know when you do things you're ashamed of, you do it and you do them in secret.
You don't want anybody else to see.
And it's always been significant to me that in the states where they hold executions they
tend to do them in remote places that people have difficulty getting to.
You know if we're going to kill people we ought to do it in the public square so everybody
can see what this looks like.
Thank you for sharing both of this closest door.
Wendy this is Carl Fowler.
Oh she did hear me.
Hello.
Hi Wendy.
How are you?
Great.
How are you?
Great.
Great to see you guys.
I forgot you were coming.
Yeah.
So I hope I didn't make a lot of noise for you.
You're so fine.
As they call just going to close the door.
Yeah.
This is a very sensitive microphone here.
It'll pick up anything.
Don't bring too loud Wendy.
I think let's do two more questions and we can be done if that's all right.
Actually I want to ask one more thing about what you were talking about.
Maybe the Virginia being ashamed of the death penalty.
Why do you think the state would do something for so long knowing that people were opposed
to it and knowing that they couldn't even do it in the public eye so to speak moving
into a rural location.
What do you think kept the death penalty going essentially until recently?
In Virginia.
Right.
Because it's still going in a lot of states.
Most of what happened to be in the South.
I think there are a number of reasons.
There are still a number of people who support capital punishment, some talk fully, some
not so talk fully.
I think it took a while for public opinion polls to shift away from pretty strong support
for capital punishment to not so strong support to less than 50% support when there were other.
You can send someone to life in prison and that person could never harm anybody again.
If you don't kill them, at least they'll be alive if they're innocent and we uncover
evidence of their innocence.
In tradition, I think in the South, I think there is very much a racist aspect to the
death penalty.
I think in some states for sure it was a legal way to continue lynching black people after
lynching became outlawed.
And there are still a disproportionate number of the people on death row in the South,
or African-American, or people of color, black or brown people.
And this is especially true of the victims of white.
So I think all those factors and their others as well.
I think it's going to take a while for the practice to end.
I think it will eventually.
I think it's really good that Virginia became the first state in the South to end the
practice.
I think that might give motivation and momentum to other Southern states and there are
abolition movements in every Southern state to end the practice there as well.
There wasn't one time when there was hope that the US Supreme Court would declare it unlawful
as cruel and unusual punishment, but that's not going to happen in my lifetime.
But I do the advantage of doing it legislatively is it's hard to bring it back.
It can get brought back, but with every passing year after a state has ended capital punishment,
it becomes harder and harder to bring it back.
And now the number of states that have ended, I've lost track of that number, but it's
more than half that either actually or effectively have ended capital punishment.
So we're going to get there eventually.
We're the only nation in the Western world that has capital punishment.
We're a company with Pakistan, Iran, China, Russia.
I mean, that's the company we keep when it comes to capital punishment.
Not a very good set of companions.
Sure.
Yeah, thanks for going a little bit more in detail there.
So pretty related.
What do you think?
How do you feel about the abolition, victory, and origin?
You said we got a long way to go to make this national, but just kind of in terms of the
decades of work that you put in in one form or another.
What did you feel when you heard that it was done for in Virginia?
I was very pleased.
I was pretty confident.
At the time that actually happened, I had been pretty confident for a while.
It was going to happen because I was in touch with Michael and others who were working
on the effort.
It was very significant when Governor Northam came out in support of a policy capital punishment.
That was very helpful.
And I think it's sure that all the Democrats in the general assembly were going to line
up and they were going to back the abolition bills.
But in the meantime, Michael and Dale and others had persuaded a number of Republicans to support
abolition as well.
Now, in the final analysis, they did not sign on to the abolition bills, but it was because
arguably because of a technicality.
It wasn't because they supported capital punishment, but they wanted the crimes that had
previously been capital crimes to be reclassified.
As I can remember what turned to use, but very serious murder.
They carried with them a mandatory life without parole sentence.
And the Democrats said, no, we're not going to do that.
We're moving away from mandatory minimum sentences.
This is the whole over incarceration problem.
We're not going to support that.
So they drew a line in the sand.
Most of the Republicans, not all of them, but most of the Republicans drew a line in the
sand.
So the Republicans, mostly the Republicans, and the House, I think, that murdered in favor
of the bill there.
I don't think any Republicans in the Senate murdered in favor of it.
But for that reason, there would have been more.
If they hadn't taken that, if the Republicans had not taken that position, and they really
didn't need to, I guess they fit.
I don't know why they did.
So they're on the political reasons, I guess.
So that was unfortunate because of all the work that had been put into time to get Republican
support for abolition.
But anyway, I think, even if the Republicans regain control of the General Assembly, I
think it's going to be very hard to bring back, to bring them to tell me back.
I don't think there's a whole, I really, I don't, at least in Virginia, there's not a
groundswell support for Capitol punishment.
I don't, I always said that even back in the 90s, or no, in the us, when I was on the board,
I like to say that support for Capitol punishment is a mile wide and an inch deep.
It's not something that people really care about.
Because I don't think people, despite the fact that there was an escape from death row
back in 1984, that was so long ago, I think if dangerous, if people that the public perceives
as dangerous because of the crimes they've committed are locked up, I think the vast majority
of people don't worry about them anymore.
And so they're not clamoring to have them killed so that they don't have to worry about
them anymore.
That's just, that just doesn't happen.
So I just don't think there's going to be a much stomach for bringing it back.
I mean, that's my own personal view.
I could be wrong, but I don't think so.
Awesome.
All right.
So we're going to move into this last question.
If you, I don't, I don't think it's super important.
If you would like to just give, all right, can that's not doing anything?
Let me just look at the camera a little bit more, just, you know, kind of answering this
question.
I don't know how many people are going to be at this event.
I'm imagining it's going to be, you know, pretty large, but Michael made it a point to
include this question.
What would you like to say to the VADP supporters who are going to be at this event?
It's November 21st.
So, you know, whatever you feel is important.
It's fine.
Well, I hope there's a large number of VADP supporters at the event in November celebrating
the abolition of capital punishment in Virginia.
And I just want to say how important the supporters of VADP have been throughout the decades
that so many of us have worked on this issue.
VADP supporters support the organization not only by their financial contributions, but
also by their participating in programs in their area.
I mean, there are active chapters, so to speak, in Northern Virginia, in Roanoke, in
Togwater, and certainly in the Richmond area.
They write letters to the editor.
They speak about the issue with their churches.
They talk about the issue among their friends.
I think this was a significant factor in moving the needle of public opinion in favor of
ending this practice, which I think was a huge factor in the ability to finally end it
once in for all in Virginia.
So thank you to all VADP supporters for your work.
Thank you.
You know, we've been going for an over half an hour here.
I'm super great to be done with you, RZ.
That's fine, not bad.
Nothing else to say.
All right.
