Lawmakers vote to make Virginia first Southern state to abolish death penalty
By Laura Vozzella
Feb. 22, 2021 at 5:41 p.m. GMT
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RICHMOND — A bill to abolish the death penalty in Virginia won final approval in the state Senate on Monday and will be sent to Gov. Ralph Northam (D), who is expected to sign it.
Virginia — historically one of the nation’s most prolific death-penalty states — would then become the first in the South to abandon the ultimate punishment.
The state Senate approved by a vote of 22-16 a House bill that bans executions and establishes a maximum punishment of life in prison without the possibility of parole. A judge would have discretion to suspend part of that sentence — a sticking point for some Republicans, who pushed unsuccessfully to make life without parole a mandatory minimum.
An identical Senate bill, sponsored by Sen. Scott A. Surovell (D-Fairfax), is making its way through the House — although now that the House bill was approved by both chambers, the Senate version does not need to pass the House for the legislation to become law. Del. Michael P. Mullin (D-Newport News), a prosecutor for the city of Hampton, carried the House version.
Virginia has imposed capital punishment since colonial times, ahead of the rest of the nation. Since a spy for Spain was executed in Jamestown Colony in 1608, 1,390 people have been put to death in the state, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, Virginia has executed 113 people — more than any state but Texas. Oklahoma is a close third.
Some Virginia Republicans have argued that execution is still warranted for the most vicious crimes.
The death penalty is already outlawed in neighboring D.C. and Maryland, which abolished it in 2013. Virginia would become the 23rd state to ban the punishment, following Colorado’s abolition last year.
In some sense, the death penalty has been dying of its own accord in Virginia, thanks to the growing reluctance of prosecutors to seek it and juries to impose it. No jury in Virginia has handed down a death sentence since 2011. The state has not executed anyone since 2017, when it put two people to death.
But until recently, Virginia lawmakers resisted the national trend toward abolition. Amid a scarcity of lethal-injection drugs in 2016, the Republicans who then led the legislature passed a bill to make the electric chair Virginia’s default method of execution.
Under the law then, as now, condemned inmates can choose the method of execution: lethal injection or the chair. (The last inmate to pick electrocution in Virginia was Robert Gleason Jr. in 2013.)
The 2016 bill would have let the state use the electric chair when it could not obtain the drugs. Then-governor Terry McAuliffe (D) gutted the legislation, but in a way that allowed the state to carry on with executions by specially ordering the drugs from compounding pharmacies. The pharmacies’ identities were to be kept secret to shield them from political pressure.
The plan became law, but was repealed last year as Democrats took control of the General Assembly.
Their efforts to abolish the death penalty stalled during that legislative session. But the movement picked up steam later in the year, amid calls for racial justice following the death of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, in Minneapolis police custody. Some Democrats who had long supported the death penalty, including Senate Majority Leader Richard L. Saslaw (D-Fairfax), were persuaded to support abolition.
Nationally, non-Whites account for a disproportionate 55 percent of inmates on death row, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
In Virginia, the one-time capital of the Confederacy, the death penalty has had a strong connection to the commonwealth’s history of racial injustice. State law used to differentiate capital and noncapital crimes based on the race of the perpetrator and the race of the victim. Once that discrimination was declared unconstitutional, it persisted in practice due to the discretion afforded all-White juries, according to Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.
From 1900 to 1969, he said, Virginia did not execute a single White person for any offense that did not result in death, while 73 Black men were executed for rape, attempted rape or robbery.
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Laura Vozzella
Laura Vozzella covers Virginia politics for The Washington Post. Before joining The Post, she was a political columnist and food writer at the Baltimore Sun, and she has also worked for the Associated Press, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the Hartford Courant. Follow
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