Advocates hope the transfer will result in an finish to capital punishment within the US south, the place most executions happen.
Virginia Governor Ralph Northam signed laws on Wednesday making Virginia the twenty third state to abolish the dying penalty, a dramatic shift for the commonwealth, which had the second-highest variety of executions in the USA.
“There is no such thing as a place at the moment for the dying penalty on this commonwealth, within the south or on this nation,” Northam mentioned shortly earlier than signing the laws.
The payments have been the end result of a years-long battle by Democrats who argued the dying penalty has been utilized disproportionately to folks of color, the mentally in poor health and the poor.
Republicans unsuccessfully argued that the dying penalty ought to stay a sentencing possibility for particularly heinous crimes and to convey justice to victims and their households.
Virginia’s new Democratic majority, in full management of the Basic Meeting for a second yr, received the talk final month when each the Senate and the Home of Delegates handed payments banning capital punishment.
Nationwide and native rights teams applauded the measure.
Kristina Roth, senior advocate for the Legal Justice Applications at Amnesty Worldwide USA, mentioned in an announcement the organisation welcomes the information.
“The dying penalty is irreversible, it’s ineffective, and it doesn’t deter crime … We hope to see extra states work to retire this most excessive punishment to the place it belongs – as a relic of the previous, not part of our future,” Roth concluded.
“Virginia’s legacy on the dying penalty was so intently related to its historical past of slavery and lynching,” Reverend LaKeisha Cook dinner, a justice reform organiser with the Virginia Interfaith Middle for Public Coverage, mentioned in an announcement delivered to Al Jazeera.
Northam, a Democrat, signed the Home and Senate payments in a ceremony underneath a tent on Wednesday after touring the execution chamber on the Greensville Correctional Middle, the place 102 folks have been put to dying since executions have been moved there from the Virginia State Penitentiary within the early Nineteen Nineties.
Northam mentioned the dying penalty has been disproportionately utilized to Black folks and is the product of a flawed judicial system that doesn’t at all times get it proper. Since 1973, greater than 170 folks have been launched from dying row after proof of their innocence was uncovered, he mentioned.
“Now that it’s coming to an finish, we will begin a brand new chapter that embraces an evidence-based strategy to public security: one which values the dignity of all human beings and is concentrated on remodeling the justice system into one rooted in equity, accountability, and redemption.”
Virginia has executed almost 1,400 folks since its days as a colony. In trendy instances, the state is second solely to Texas within the variety of executions it has carried out, with 113 because the Supreme Courtroom reinstated the dying penalty in 1976, in keeping with the nonprofit Dying Penalty Info Middle.
Solely two males stay on Virginia’s dying row: Anthony Juniper, who was sentenced to dying within the 2004 slayings of his ex-girlfriend, two of her kids, and her brother; and Thomas Porter, who was sentenced to dying for the 2005 killing of a Norfolk police officer. Their sentences will now be commuted to life in jail with out parole.
Along with the 23 states which have now abolished the dying penalty, three others have moratoriums in place that have been imposed by their governors.
Robert Dunham, govt director of the Dying Penalty Info Middle, mentioned the laws might mark the start of the tip for capital punishment within the south, the place most executions at the moment happen.
“Virginia’s dying penalty has deep roots in slavery, lynchings and Jim Crow segregation,” Dunham advised The Related Press information company. “The symbolic worth of dismantling this device that has been used traditionally as a mechanism for racial oppression by a legislature sitting within the former capital of the Confederacy can’t be overstated.”