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News > U.S.

Virginia Becomes First State in US South to Abolish Death Penalty

  • Virginia ended its 400-year history of carrying out executions on Wednesday, becoming the first state in the U.S. South to abolish the death penalty.

    Virginia ended its 400-year history of carrying out executions on Wednesday, becoming the first state in the U.S. South to abolish the death penalty. | Photo: Twitter/@GovernorVA

Published 25 March 2021
Opinion

Virginia on Wednesday became the first southern U.S. state to abolish the death penalty after Gov. Ralph Northam signed a law making the territory the 23rd in the country to ban the practice.

At a ceremony at Greensville Prison, where inmates were executed, Northam defended the ban as the "morally right" thing to do.

Virginia has carried out more executions than any of the other 50 U.S. states, with nearly 1,400 death row inmates since its founding as a colony in the early 1600s.

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"Signing this bill into law is the right thing to do," said Northam, who noted that Virginia's history is something to be proud of, except for the death penalty.

A total of 102 people have been executed at Greensville Jail since it opened in 1991. The last execution carried out in this state was in 2017.

The governor claimed that Virginia's application of the death penalty was being carried out with procedural flaws and was also racially biased.

"Virginia has come close to executing innocent people, and black citizens are disproportionately sentenced to death sentences," he said.

The governor said the system is known not always to work. "We can't give someone capital punishment without being 100 percent sure we are right," he said.

Northam detailed that in the 20th century, 296 of the 377 death row inmates in Virginia were black citizens.

Also, he cited studies showing that convicts are three times more likely to be sentenced to death for a crime if the victim is white than if the victim is a black person.

"It's not fair," he added. "It's applied differently depending on who you are."

The Virginia House of Delegates passed a 57-41 vote last month to end capital punishment, two days before the state Senate passed a similar bill.

Since the state reinstated the death penalty in 1976, it has become the second territory after Texas to execute the most people.

This southern region of the United States was home to the Confederacy's capital that fought against the northern states to maintain slavery, and in the past, was renowned for the lynching of Black people.

Meanwhile, two convicts waiting on death row will have their sentences commuted to life imprisonment without parole.

The death penalty has been abolished in 23 states, while in three others - California, Oregon, and Pennsylvania - there is a moratorium on its application.

In total, seven people were executed in the United States last year by state courts, as many convictions were suspended due to the pandemic.

Simultaneously, former President Donald Trump resumed executions at the federal level, and 13 people were put to death between July 2020 and January 20, when the Republicans left office. His successor, Democrat Joe Biden, has promised to abolish the death penalty at the federal level.

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