7/13/2020 Kristina Leslie column: Death penalty repeal is essential to racial healing | Columnists | richmond.com
Capital punishment
Kristina Leslie column: Death penalty repeal is essential to racial
healing
By Kristina Leslie Jul 2, 2020
Kristina Leslie
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7/13/2020 Kristina Leslie column: Death penalty repeal is essential to racial healing | Columnists | richmond.com
Michat Chodyra
To watch a police officer crush the life out of George Floyd’s body, while other officers
stood by complicit, is a chilling reminder that the racial terror of Black Americans never
ends.
The recent murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks and too many
others disturbingly are similar to the thousands of documented lynchings that occurred in
the United States, from the Reconstruction era through World War II.
For generations, this country’s failure to effectively combat, or even confront, systemic
racism has resulted in the brutal, discriminatory treatment of Black and brown people.
Nowhere is racial bigotry more insidious than in the application of America’s harshest
punishment — death.
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7/13/2020 Kristina Leslie column: Death penalty repeal is essential to racial healing | Columnists | richmond.com
Bryan Stevenson’s scholarship with the Equal Justice Initiative shows that capital
punishment directly is related to lynching. Southern states with the highest lynching rates
now lead the nation in the number of executions. Shamefully, Virginia is No. 1 on that list,
executing more people in its 400-year history than any other state.
Scholars and lawyers — including the U.S. Department of Justice — have examined the
role of race in capital punishment. These studies reaffirm what many minority
communities already know — racial bias inextricably is tied to the death penalty. While
Black Americans constitute about 13% of the U.S. population, they account for 42% of
America’s death row.
But it is the victim’s race that often determines sentencing outcomes. According to the
Death Penalty Information Center, 76% of those executed since 1976 had white victims
while only 15% of defendants who killed Black people were executed. In Virginia, of the
1,390 documented executions carried out since 1608, only four involved a white defendant
killing a Black victim — all since 1997. This data suggests that Black lives are
undervalued.
Virginia’s death penalty history is littered with horrific abuses and flagrant misconduct.
One egregious case occurred in 1949 when seven young Black men were charged in
Martinsville with the rape of a white woman. All seven men — several falsely threatened
into confessing with nonexistent lynch mobs — were convicted of rape, and aiding and
abetting rape by white juries, then assembly-line electrocuted on two separate days.
In stark contrast, at the same time as the Martinsville cases, the Norfolk Journal reported
that a white Virginia man named Murrel Dudley was convicted of raping a “feeble-minded
colored woman.” He was fined $20.
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7/13/2020 Kristina Leslie column: Death penalty repeal is essential to racial healing | Columnists | richmond.com
Seventy years later, racial considerations still permeate our courtrooms and improperly
affect who lives and who dies. Black and brown people are more likely to be prosecuted
for capital murder, sentenced to death and ultimately executed, especially if the victim is
white.
Capital defendants in the commonwealth are restrained by waist chains and leg irons while
seated in a courtroom adorned with portraits commemorating men of the Confederacy.
Typically, the judge, prosecutors and defense attorneys all are white. As a Black lawyer, I
am profoundly aware that my client and I are the only minorities in the room.
No matter how well-meaning and well-intentioned, race and the death penalty are two
inseparable sides of the same coin.
The two men remaining on Virginia’s death row are Black. There have been no executions
in Virginia since 2017 and nearly a decade since a Virginia jury handed down a death
sentence — which was overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in
2018. That same year, a Prince William County jury rejected a death sentence for a Black
soldier who killed a white police officer. Virginians have turned away from the death
penalty in the courtroom.
Now, it is time for the General Assembly to follow suit. All killings, particularly those
carried out by the state in a biased manner, dilute the morality of society as a whole.
Meaningful and equitable criminal justice reform, born in the wake of the recent police
murders of Black Americans and subsequent protests, must include abolishing the death
penalty.
Gov. Ralph Northam has promised to sign a death penalty repeal bill. Virginia legislators,
supported by Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, will introduce an abolition
bill in the 2021 General Assembly.
Virginia has the opportunity to be the first Southern state to abolish capital punishment to
correct the wrongs of the past and advance toward a more just, equitable and unbiased
tomorrow.
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7/13/2020 Kristina Leslie column: Death penalty repeal is essential to racial healing | Columnists | richmond.com
Kristina Leslie is a public defender in Maryland and the president of Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
She formerly served as a trial attorney for the Capital Defender Office in Northern Virginia, which represents those
charged with capital murder. Contact her at: Kristina.leslie10@gmail.com
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