MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 25th March, 2021) The abolition of the capital penalty in Virginia is a historic step toward racial healing and a fairer criminal legal system, Robert Dunham, the Executive Director of The Death Penalty Information Center said, as the capital punishment in the state was finally axed.
On Wednesday, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam signed a bill that abolished the death penalty, making Virginia, which has used capital punishment more than any other state, the 23rd US state to abolish the death penalty. Northam had a symbolic tour in the death chamber at the Greensville Correction Center, after which he signed the bill.
"In the modern era, it [Virginia] has executed a greater proportion of those it condemned than has any other state. Its abolition of a policy long steeped in racism, with the support of every statewide elected official, is an important and historic step towards racial healing and a fairer criminal legal system," Dunham said.
Dunham recalled that between 1900 and 1977, the year the US supreme court banned offenses that did not result in death, the state executed 73 Black men on charges of robbery, rape or attempted rape. No white man was executed for the same offenses back then.
"The symbolic value of a legislature sitting in the former capital of the Confederacy dismantling this tool of racial oppression cannot be overstated," Dunham stated.
Overall, some 1,400 people have been executed in Virginia since the colonial era. In modern times the state is the second on the list of states performing death penalties, following only Texas.
"Virginia's abolition of capital punishment is tremendously significant, both in terms of the death penalty's continuing nationwide decline and as a historical marker of race relations in the United States. No state that has relied so heavily on capital punishment has ever before repealed its death penalty," Dunham said.
In the wake of the signing of the bill, the state authorities will commute the sentences of the two inmates on death row to life without parole.
