The House of Delegates voted to abolish the death penalty Friday morning, following the Senate’s vote to do the same Thursday. Governor Ralph Northam is expected to sign the legislation once it reaches his desk, making Virginia the first state in the south to abolish the death penalty.
In the House, the measure passed by a vote of 57 to 41, with three Republicans voting for it.
There are two men currently on death row in Virginia, and this bill, if signed, would change their sentences to life in prison.
Virginia has a long history with the death penalty and has executed more people than any other state. Part of that is the Commonwealth’s age: a colonist was put to death in 1608 in Jamestown. Since 1976, when capital punishment was reinstated, 113 were killed. Only Texas has executed more in that time period.
In an emotional debate on Thursday, two delegates’ recounted how their experiences as prosecutors brought them to opposite sides of the issue.
Delegate Michael Mullin, a Democrat from Newport News thought about the possibility of wrongly convicting someone.
“Over the course of my career, I've prosecuted somewhere around 10,000 cases,” he said in a virtual session. “Given those numbers, it's a very real possibility that somewhere in those thousands of cases, someone was wrongly convicted.”
Earl Washington received a stay of execution nine days before his sentence was scheduled to be carried out. He was later exonerated.
Mullin’s remarks outlined several reasons for abolishing the death penalty: that capital cases cost much more to move through the legal system and argued that its existence isn’t a deterrent.
He also called the death penalty racist. According to a study in The Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review a defendant is 17 times more likely to be sentenced to death if the victim is white.
Republican Delegate Jason Miyares, who represents Virginia Beach, asked people to think about the victims. Miyares, a former prosecutor, recounted capital cases in gruesome detail.
“If there's one word to describe what happened to these victims is just cruelty, unimaginable cruelty on a scale that's hard to even process.”
Delegate Kathleen Murphy of Fairfax spoke from the perspective of a victim. She recounted how she felt following the murder of her brother.
“It's a grief that never ends; it is never lifted from your heart. I did not want these men to be able to ever speak to their families or to laugh at a joke or to see sunshine,” she said. “There are no do-overs just as my brother will never have a do-over.”
Murphy voted to abolish the death penalty.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.