The state Senate on Wednesday voted to end the death penalty in Virginia after a four-century history of executions.
The senators voted 21-17 to end the practice after about two hours of impassioned debate, with Democrats voting to end the practice and Republicans voting to keep it.
An identical version of the bill is advancing quickly in the House of Delegates, and Gov. Ralph Northam has vowed to sign it, in what would mark a significant shift to the state’s criminal justice system following the Democrats taking control of both the General Assembly and the governor’s mansion.
The House abolition bill, sponsored by Del. Mike Mullin, D-Newport News, passed the House Courts of Justice Committee on Wednesday by a vote of 15-6, but has not yet made it to the full House for a floor vote.
Senators who voted for the change Wednesday said capital punishment can lead to the death of innocent people, is steeped in racism going back centuries and puts Virginia and the United States out of step with the rest of the industrialized world.
“We’re going to look back 50 years from now, and that electric chair and that lethal injection table, they’re going be sitting in a museum,” said the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax, before the final vote.
“They’re gonna be sitting next to the stocks in Jamestown and Williamsburg,” Surovell said. “They’re going to be sitting next to the slave auctioneer block. This thing is going to be a museum piece, and people are going to look back and wonder how it was that we ever used these things.”
Senators in favor of the move spoke of the 174 death row exonerations across the country since 1976, largely based on DNA and other new evidence.
That includes Earl Washington Jr., an intellectually disabled man who came within nine days of execution after confessing to a 1982 rape and capital murder in Culpeper County that he didn’t commit.
Though Virginia is about 20 percent African American, Black inmates have accounted for 46 percent of the 114 people who have been executed statewide since 1976, according to a database from the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington.
Sen. Mamie Locke, D-Hampton, drew parallels from history, evoking scenes of Black people being lynched — often for minor offenses — as white people picnicked nearby.
“Lynchings were the precursor of the death penalty,” she said on the Senate floor. “In the 1940s and 1950s, they simply moved from outside to the inside — legal violence instead of vigilante justice. It is not lost on anyone — it’s those states that have a high number of lynchings that correlate with their support of the death penalty, including here in Virginia.”
On Tuesday, the senators rejected on a 22-17 vote an amendment by Sen. William M. Stanley Jr., R-Franklin County, that would have mandated that anyone convicted of “aggravated murder” — which would replace the capital murder under the new legislation — get a “mandatory minimum” of life behind bars.
Though Stanley had been a chief co-sponsor of the bill to abolish capital punishment, he no longer supported the legislation without his amendment — and he lamented that the bill was no longer coming from both sides of the aisle.
“This could have been coming out today as a bipartisan effort to end the death penalty in Virginia,” Stanley said. “Instead, it’s a party line effort. … My name is on this bill, but I cannot support it.”
Senators also voted down proposed amendments by Senate Minority Leader Thomas K. Norment Jr., R-James City, that would have kept the death penalty on the table for the willful slaying of a police officer in the line of duty and the killing of two people as part of one “transaction.”
Experts say capital punishment has steadily eroded across the country over the past two decades, as prosecutors have largely abandoned the practice and jurors’ concerns have mounted about possibly getting it wrong.
Twenty-two states have now abolished capital punishment, and 12 others have not conducted an execution in more than a decade.
But those wanting to keep the death penalty contended the decreased usage is actually an argument for keeping the practice in place, not doing away with it altogether.
Sen. Mark Obenshain, R-Rockingham County, agreed that capital punishment has been misused at times in history, but he said its more sparing use — as well as legal protections and the advance of DNA — are excellent safeguards.
“I believe that capital sanctions can be fairly applied in Virginia today,” Obenshain said. “I think that it is important not to look at the way that capital punishment was applied in the 17th and 18th century, the 19th century — or even the 20th century, much of it. But I think what we need to do is look at how it’s being applied now. And it is rare. It is reserved for the worst of the worst.”
He spoke of a 2001 case in which a man paid a hit man $2,000 to slit his girlfriend’s throat, and she lay dead in the bathroom for two days as her 21-month old toddler crawled near her body. Then there was a 2006 case in which seven people were murdered over a week’s time in Richmond, including the bounding and torturing of the Harvey family found in their Carytown basement.
“They savagely murdered all of them, including the 4-year-old son and the 9-year-old daughter,” Obenshain said. “These are savage crimes, the worst of the worst. These are not crimes that are picked up by prosecutors across Virginia on a daily basis.”
The defendant in the first case was convicted of capital murder, he said, but had his sentence commuted to life. The defendant in the second case, Ricky Javon Gray, was executed in 2017.
The death penalty abolition would apply retroactively to the last two Virginia death row inmates, both of whom were convicted in Norfolk. They would walk off of death row and get life behind bars instead.
That includes Anthony Juniper, who was convicted in 2005 for the slaying of four people in Norfolk — his former girlfriend, her brother and her two small children.
It also includes Thomas A. Porter, who was sentenced to death in 2007 for killing Norfolk police officer Stanley Cornell Reaves during a robbery call in Park Place two years earlier.
Under current law, 15 kinds of slayings qualify for a death penalty prosecution — from murder-for-hire to killing a law enforcement officer to the killing a child younger than 14.
Other “capital-eligible” crimes include killing a witness in a pending court case; killing a judge; killing someone during a robbery, rape or abduction; killing more than one person over a three-year period; and killing a pregnant woman with the intent to kill her fetus.
Prosecutors can charge any of those crimes as standard first-degree murder cases, punishable by 20 years to life. In Hampton Roads, for example, murders committed during robberies, abductions and rapes are virtually all prosecuted as first-degree murder cases.
But if a prosecutor charges the case capitally and gets a conviction, the crimes are punishable by either death or life without parole, even as judges can suspend part of the life sentences in any of the crimes on the list with the sole exception of killing a police officer.
Stanley said he initially supported the bill because “vengeance is not mine.”
“It is for God to decide,” Stanley said of the decision to kill someone in retaliation. “And I certainly don’t believe that a government should have that awesome power of God. … The ultimate penalty of death, even for those who have committed heinous crimes, is an act of vengeance … It solves nothing except a lust for vengeance, which in my mind is a sin.”
But Stanley asserted that “life without parole should mean life without parole” — and that judges shouldn’t have the power to suspend a life term in these cases. “What if they do multiple killings in the same transaction, kill a whole family? You trust that judge enough … not to give any other sentence but life without parole? I don’t.”
The first recorded public execution in Virginia took place at Jamestown in 1608, and the state has put more people to death than any other state since Colonial times, at 1,390 people, about 8 percent of the nation’s historical total since that time.
After a nine-year moratorium on the death penalty ended in 1976 after U.S. Supreme Court decisions, Texas has led the way with 567 executions — a third of the country’s total since that time — followed by Virginia at 114, Oklahoma at 113 and Florida at 99.
But nearly four years have passed since Virginia’s last execution, a far cry from the state’s 57 executions between 1995 and 2000 — and 10 years since juries handed down the state’s last two death sentences. The two death row inmates are down from 40 in 1998.
Sen. Janet Howell, D-Reston, who voted in favor of the bill, said her views on capital punishment had changed over the years. Though she initially saw it as a victim’s rights issue and supported it, she said everything changed when her father in law was murdered by a burglar.
“That tore us apart then, and there’s still a huge hole in our hearts,” she said. “But one thing I discovered as we went through this trauma was that my family didn’t agree on the death penalty …. And I was trying to hold my family together in a very difficult time.”
“I don’t buy the idea that we would support the death penalty for the benefit of victims families,” Howell said. “It doesn’t work that way.”
Peter Dujardin, 757-247-4749, pdujardin@dailypress.com
