U.S. News

Virginia Abolishes The Death Penalty

The Death Penalty has been Terminated in an effort to Support Fair Treatment of all Races.

Reporter Joshua Coleman

On March 24, 2021, Gov. Ralph Northam signed a law that abolished the death sentence in Virginia. The signing took place in Greensville Correctional Center. This law originated due to many moral and racial issues.

On February 3, 2021, the Virginia state senate determined to remove the commonwealth’s death penalty. Previously, Virginia was the second leading state for executions via the death penalty (Texas being the first). Virginia also holds the title for the longest period of using the death penalty (the first execution in 1608).

However, these titles crumbled on March 24, 2021. The main reason is the increasing racial tensions. The law passed is somewhat controversial, but was passed to support fair treatment of all races. The main argument for the law's enactment is how disproportionately the death penalty is towards Black offenders. Gov. Ralph Northam agreed with this statement calling the death penalty "fundamentally flawed." Likewise, Dr. LaKeisha Cook of VICPP added that "capital punishment is a direct descendant of slavery, lynching and Jim Crow."

There is hope among the members of the Virginian government that in the future they can persuade other Southern states to drop the death penalty.

Cook says, "We're just really hopeful that now what has happened in Virginia will help other Southern states and other states throughout the country to take the same step and finally just get rid of this horrible public policy."

The plan of substituting the death penalty with life imprisonment is the plan for the future. According to a Gallup poll published in 2019, the majority of Americans (60%) said they preferred life imprisonment over the death penalty, even with convicted murders.

As time progresses, many states are starting to grow in awareness of the role race plays in justice,, and the current Black Lives Matter movement helped accelerate that. Studies conducted in 2015 by the University of North Carolina and Georgetown Law Center researched U.S. executions between 1976 and 2013. They found that the race of the crime’s victim is the “single most reliable predictor of whether a defendant in the USA will be executed.” Defendants were seldom executed if the victim was Black, while some other studies discovered that defendants who killed white Americans were more likely to receive a death sentence.

The death penalty runs down in Virginian history for over 400 years, with the first execution in America taking place in Jamestown. The execution was of a man named Captain George Kendall for being a Spanish spy. Over those 400 years, 1,300 people were executed by the state. Since then 22 states have abolished the death penalty. Virginia is considered the first Southern state to have done this. It is also considered the second state with the most executions. (Texas, as mentioned before, is still the leading state with 570 executed since 1982.)

As of today, the death penalty stands abolished in the State of Virginia, along with most other Northern states. The law in question was passed to support the equality and fair treatment of all races.