The History of Electrocution in Virginia Is Racist and Should Not Be Continued
Less than a year after South Carolina lowered the Confederate flag from its capitol building, Virginia is
prepared to revive another inflammatory symbol of the Jim Crow South—the electric chair.
“Old Sparky” was first used to electrocute a black man in 1908 convicted of raping a white woman. Since
then it has been used to execute every person of color convicted of a non-homicide. No white person has
ever been electrocuted for a crime less than capital murder.
Virginia’ electric chair killed the youngest person ever executed in Virginia, a 16 year-old black child
named Percy Ellis. It also was used to execute Virginia Christian, a 17 year-old black maid and the only
women executed by electrocution. In one day— February 2, 1951— the electric chair killed four A frican-
American men who were part of the “Martinsville Seven.” On February 5, the same chair killed the
remaining three. Six of the seven men executed were put to death for non-homicides.
Since 1908, Virginia has electrocuted 267 people. The vast majority of the people electrocuted— 217—
were black. Of the 50 white men Virginia electrocuted, 7 chose electrocution over lethal injection to be
the method used in their executions.! Given it historical use, it is unsurprising that no black person in
Virginia has ever chosen to die by electrocution.
The electric chair was introduced in the Commonwealth as part of Virginia’ s solution to racist lynch mobs.
From 1880 to 1950, Virginia was able to reduce the incidence of lynchings to the lowest amongst
southern states. This was accomplished by replacing lynchings with speedy trials and swift
electrocutions.’ This fact was recognized by the Supreme C ourt of Virginia in Hart v. Commonwealth,>
when the Court explained that prompt convictions and swift executions were needed because of the
“likelihood of resort to lynch law.”
Hart v. Commonwealth, decided in 1921, is often cited as the seminal case in which the Supreme Court of
Virginia approved the constitutionality of death by electrocution. But the holding in the case actually had
almost nothing to do with electrocution. The Court’s actual decision addressed whether executing Hart, a
black man who had been convicted of attempting to rape a white woman, was a cruel and unusual
punishment. The Court held that it was not, and found death by electrocution no more objectionable than
the “acceptable” punishment it had previously approved for “free men of color”: being sold into slavery,
banished from the United States, and given “39 stripes on his bare back.”
The Court did not actually examine any information about how electrocution is carried out, or its results.
Instead, the Court simply pointed to a Supreme Court of the United States case from the 1880s, In re
Kemmler, which had approved of electrocution in theory as an improvement over execution by hanging.
At the time of the Kemmler decision, no execution by electrocution had ever occurred, so the Court had
no evidence of how the practice itself was carried out. The Supreme Court of Virginia still relies on Hart
v. Commonwealth to justify its conclusion that death by electrocution does not constitute cruel and
unusual punishment.
Virginia was the first southern state to select the electric chair as its chosen method of execution. Like
many vestiges of that time, its day has passed. Virginia’ s twenty-first century legislators should not drag
us back to nineteenth century practices.
1 Data pulled from Executions in the United States, 1602-2002: The ESPY File (ICPSR 8451), available at
http://www icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/NA CJD/studies/8451 (last visited Feb. 19, 2016) and Gary Harki,
“State officials may be using Ricky Gray execution to bring back electric chair,” The Virginian-Pilot (Feb.
15, 2016), available at http://pilotonline.com/news/govemment/politics/virginia/state- officials-may-be-
using-ricky-gray-execution-to-bring/article_a6a9c9f0-373c-5575-9c5b-a3c7bad8al 32. html.
? Frank Green, “The Execution Files; State’s Death Penalty History Told in Personal Records of the
Condemned,” Richmond Times Dispatch, A-1 (Dec. 5, 2004).
3109 S.E.2d 582 (Va. 1921).
