America’s bloodiest state votes to ban the death penalty

Opponents of the death penalty are celebrating after Virginia yesterday became the first southern state in the US to abolish capital punishment.

According to the US Death Penalty Information Center, the state has put more than 1,300 people to death since the first execution was carried out there in 1608 - a year after the first settlers arrived. That tally means Virginia “has executed more people in its history than any other US state”, says The Times.

But after a bill banning capital punishment was signed into law by Democratic Governor Ralph Northam yesterday, “the only two people on death row in the state, both of whom are black men, will now have their sentences commuted to life in prison”, the paper reports.

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Northam signed the legislation at Virginia Greensville Correctional Center, “where lethal injections and electrocutions have been carried out for 30 years”, The Virginian-Pilot reports.

“The death penalty is fundamentally flawed,” Northam said. “It is the moral thing to do to end it.”

Northam had toured the prison, including the execution chamber, before signing the legislation, which was passed by the Democrat-controlled state legislature in early February.

“It is a powerful thing to stand in the room where people have been put to death,” he told lawmakers and death penalty opponents who attended the bill-signing ceremony. “I know that experience will stay with me for the rest of my life.”

Virginia has become the 23rd US state to ban the death penalty less than four years after its most recent execution.

Since “the US Supreme Court lifted a moratorium on capital punishment” in 1976, “the state has carried out 113 executions - second only to Texas - with the most recent taking place in 2017”, The Times says.

Northam and many activists have argued that “the death penalty had been unfairly weaponised against black people” and is “a form of state-sponsored lynching”, The Virginian-Pilot reports.

The Virginia governor has highlighted statistics that show “296 of the 377 people executed in Virginia in the 20th century were black”, the paper continues.

Senator Scott Surovell, the Democrat who wrote the bill abolishing the death penalty, reportedly backed the move after learning that “45 black men were executed for rape between 1908 and 1948”, but that “of the 808 white men convicted of rape during that span, not one was put to death”.

“That says to you a lot about what that penalty was used for,” Surovell said.

President Joe Biden has pledged to repeal the death penalty at a federal level, while calling on individual states to do the same. The practice remains legal in 27 US states, although only 20 have the ability to carry out death sentences, with the remainder subject to different types of moratoria.

Donald Trump’s administration resumed federal executions in 2019 after a 16-year pause, with 13 executions during his final months in the White House.