The first recorded public execution in Virginia took place at Jamestown in 1608 — with another 1,389 people put to death in the Old Dominion since that time.
But after more than 400 years, the state’s days of capital punishment may be numbered.
Though Virginia has executed more people than any other state since Colonial times, it’s been nearly four years since its last execution — and 10 years since juries handed down the state’s last two death sentences.
There are only two inmates on Virginia’s death row — both stemming from Norfolk cases — down from a peak of 40 in 1998.
And the General Assembly could now end capital punishment in Virginia altogether: Legislation backed by Gov. Ralph Northam recently passed two key Senate committees — Judiciary on a 10-4 vote and Appropriations by 12-4 — and stands a good chance at ultimate passage.
“If you look at who we stand with internationally, it’s become embarrassing,” said Sen. Scott Surovell, D-Mount Vernon, who sponsored the death penalty abolition bill with Sen. William M. Stanley Jr., R-Franklin County.
Surovell listed China, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, Somalia and ISIS as other nations or entities still performing executions, saying “there’s not a single other Western industrialized country that’s still engaging in this practice.”
“I think we aspire to lead the world in having a fair and humane justice system … and we need to move on and join the rest of the world, at least the rest of the industrialized world, in not administering this punishment,” Surovell said.
An identical House of Delegates version of the bill, sponsored by Mike Mullin, D-Newport News, a Hampton prosecutor, is just getting underway. It passed a House Courts of Justice subcommittee on Friday on a 6-2 vote.
Pushback from police groups
The main pushback to the bill so far has come from groups who maintain that willfully killing a police officer in the line of duty should remain punishable by death.
“It’s a huge slap in the face to our families and to the brave men and women in law enforcement in this state and in this country that selflessly serve and protect every single day,” Michelle Dermyer, the widow of Virginia State Police Trooper Chad Phillip Dermyer, told a Senate committee.
He was shot to death in a Richmond bus terminal in 2016, and his assailant was killed by other officers.
“The paramount goal of sentencing is the imposition of justice for families whose loved ones were violently and cruelly taken,” Michelle Dermyer said. “Eliminating the death penalty cheapens murder, and executing a death sentence absolutely guarantees that the killer will never kill again.”
Senate Minority Leader Thomas K. Norment Jr., R-James City, on Thursday submitted a proposed amendment to keep the capital murder statute on the books for killing a cop, and for killing more than one person as part of one “transaction.”
Debate is expected to take place Monday on the Senate floor.
Two Norfolk natives on death row
Under current law, 15 kinds of slayings qualify for a death penalty prosecution — from murder-for-hire to killing a law enforcement officer to someone 21 or older killing a child younger than 14.
Other capital crimes include killing a witness in a pending court case, killing a judge, killing someone during a robbery or rape, killing more than one person over a three-year period and killing a pregnant woman with the intent to kill her fetus.
Both the House and Senate bills would categorize the entire list as “aggravated murder” rather than “capital murder,” taking death off the table and making a conviction an automatic life sentence.
The legislation further stipulates that anyone now on death row would get a life term without parole — though Norment’s proposal would remove that provision and keep them on death row.
One of the two men on Virginia’s death row is Thomas A. Porter, who was sentenced in 2007 for killing Norfolk police officer Stanley Cornell Reaves during a robbery call in Park Place in October 2005.
Reaves, 33, left behind a wife and two young children.
The other death row inmate is Anthony Juniper, convicted in 2005 for the slaying of four people in Norfolk — his former girlfriend, her brother and her two small children.
Reaves’ widow, Treva Reaves of Chesapeake, declined to comment last week, and Juniper’s family could not be located for this story.
Both prosecutions were led by former Norfolk Commonwealth’s Attorney John R. Doyle III, now a sitting Circuit Court judge.
Norfolk’s current top prosecutor, Commonwealth’s Attorney Greg Underwood, has sought death in five cases since he took the office’s helm in 2009, though all of those defendants ended up pleading guilty and getting life instead.
But Underwood has since had a change of heart, recently joining a “progressive prosecutors” group asking lawmakers to push for several reforms, including abolishing the death penalty.
“There’s a basic moral reason,” Norfolk Deputy Commonwealth’s Attorney Ramin Fatehi said in speaking for the office Thursday. “We do not believe the power of the state should be deployed to kill its own citizens.”
Fatehi, now running to take his retiring boss’ place, also contends the death penalty is “racist and arbitrary” in its application.
The Norfolk prosecutor’s office has long said they don’t have any power to “disturb” the prior sentences — saying such an action would have to come by way of lawmakers or a governor’s clemency.
“The juries got to decide, and the juries did decide,” Fatehi said. “The juries spoke, and we have an obligation to respect the jury’s sentence.”
But he said allowing Porter and Juniper to come off of death row “is the General Assembly’s prerogative” and would be “consistent with the core position that the death penalty is unfair and immoral and should be abolished.”
Emotional debate
A recent state Senate Judiciary Committee debate on scrapping the death penalty led to emotional debate.
Several speakers pointed out that DNA and other evidence has led to 174 death row exonerations across the country over the past several decades.
That includes Earl Washington Jr., an intellectually disabled man who confessed to a 1982 rape and capital murder in Virginia’s Culpeper County.
Washington came within nine days of execution before then-Gov. Douglas Wilder commuted his sentence. DNA later proved he wasn’t at the scene, and Gov. Jim Gilmore granted a full pardon.
Jennifer Givens, director of the Innocence Project at the University of Virginia’s School of Law, said research suggests that the “error rate” in capital cases nationally is more than 4 percent. That means, she said, that at least 100 of the 2,500 death row inmates across the country are actually innocent.
“If we want to eliminate the risk of executing innocent people, the only way to do that is to pass this bill,” Givens said.
Several people at the Senate committee spoke of racial disparities in the death penalty system, with Blacks more likely than whites to get the ultimate punishment, and the chances higher if the victim is white.
Though Virginia is about 20 percent African American, Black inmates have accounted for 46 percent of the 114 people who have been executed statewide since 1976, according to a database from the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington.
“Society’s inability to ensure (the death penalty’s) impartial and unbiased application means it can no longer be countenanced as a criminal penalty,” Rita Davis, chief counsel to Northam, said at the Senate hearing.
“How many brothers sisters, fathers, mothers … were punished and executed not because they were guilty, but because they didn’t have access to the evidence that could prove that they were innocent?” she asked lawmakers.
But others — particularly police officer groups — strongly advocated for keeping the death penalty, while some don’t trust that a defendant sentenced to life without parole will never get out.
“We categorically oppose this bill,” said M. Wayne Huggins, executive director of the Virginia State Police Association. “Any person who will murder a police officer will murder any member of society, and we think they ought to be dealt with the most harshly.”
Angela Kyle, whose father, Virginia State Trooper Leo Whitt, was killed during a traffic stop south of Petersburg in 1985, told the lawmakers she “can’t begin to tell you what it has been like for 36 years not to have my dad, and not to have my family know my dad, and the amazing gap that’s been left without him.”
Her father’s killer, Gregory Beaver, was arrested the night of the slaying, and quickly confessed. When he was put to death in 1996, she told lawmakers, “an amazing load went off, and my nightmares stopped.”
“Listening to what people say about second chances, some people’s second chances are on how they spend their last days on death row,” Kyle said. Beaver “had a chance to talk to his creator, had a chance to talk to God, and my Dad did not get that chance because his life was stopped.”
One retired lawmaker, former state Sen. Bill Carrico, likewise asked lawmakers to keep the capital charge in place for people who kill police.
“If you got to go down this road, at least put a provision that law enforcement are not out there alone, and that their families don’t have to feel like this,” Carrico said. “That their families can feel like you have their backs — and that for anybody that attacks law enforcement, the penalty is going to be death.”
“Otherwise, it will just be an open season on law enforcement,” he added.
But one who spoke out the other way was Rachel Stuphin — the daughter of Montgomery County Sheriff’s Cpl. Eric Stuphin, slain in the line of duty in 2006. Her father’s killer, William Morva, was the last man executed by Virginia — in 2017.
“I believe the death penalty is an ineffective and outdated measure that brings no solace to family members,” Rachel Stuphin told the Senate committee. “The state would better spend their time and their money providing resources for my family versus killing another person.”
Surovell, the bill’s sponsor, contended that carving out an exception for police won’t make officers any safer. “No one who supports this bill is anti-law enforcement or wants to do anything to put our law enforcement officers any further at risk,” he said, adding that anyone “dumb enough” to try to kill an armed officer “is asking to be killed.”
“The idea that having (the death penalty) on the books is going to deter somebody who’s that stupid or reckless doesn’t hold water with me,” Surovell said.
A dying punishment?
The first person executed in the English colonies was Capt. George Kendall, executed by a firing squad at Jamestown, apparently for treason.
The 1,389 people executed in Virginia since Colonial times accounts for 8.6 percent of the 16,001 executions that the Death Penalty Information Center says have occurred in the nation’s history.
But after a nine-year moratorium on the death penalty ended in 1976 after U.S. Supreme Court decisions, Texas has led the way with 567 executions — a third of the country’s total since that time — followed by Virginia at 114, Oklahoma at 113 and Florida at 99.
For the past two decades, however, capital punishment has steadily faded.
The Death Penalty Information Center says 22 states have abolished capital punishment, with 12 others not having had an execution in more than 10 years.
The changes in law — along with prosecutors seeking the ultimate punishment in far fewer cases — has resulted in death sentences falling to 34 nationally in 2019. That’s down from 315 death sentences handed down in 1996, the Death Penalty Information Center’s numbers show.
Executions, meantime, fell to 22 in 2019, down from a high of 98 in 1999. (The numbers fell even further in 2020, though the pandemic likely played a role).
The drops appear to follow a shift in public opinion: A 2018 Gallup poll showed that 54 percent of respondents support the death penalty for murder. Though that’s up five points from the 49 percent who said the same two years earlier, it’s down significantly from the 78 percent who held that view in the late 1990s.
Virginia has followed the downward trend: Only five people have been executed in Virginia since 2011 — down sharply from the 57 executions performed between 1995 and 2000. The state’s last two death sentences were handed down 10 years ago.
In Hampton Roads, the last death sentence came in the 2009 federal prosecution of David A. Runyon, the hit man in the slaying of Navy officer Cory Alan Voss in Newport News. Runyon, hired by Voss’ wife to kill her husband, is one of several inmates on federal death row for Virginia crimes.
Juries concerned about innocence
A growing reluctance on the part of juries to mete out death sentences — mainly arising from concerns about executing an innocent person — appears to be a crucial factor in the trend.
In 2014, Newport News Commonwealth’s Attorney Howard Gwynn sought death in the case of John Moses Ragin, who was convicted of stabbing his wife and three stepchildren to death in their Denbigh home, then setting the apartment on fire and fleeing to South Carolina.
The jury voted 8-4 against death after one juror asked others to picture themselves as the state’s executioner. Ragin got multiple life terms instead.
Jurors are increasingly seeing life without parole as a viable alternative, Hampton Commonwealth’s Attorney Anton Bell told the Daily Press.
“You have these jurors where one or two individuals just can’t bring themselves to do it,” Bell said. “And they think, ‘What if we’re wrong?’ If you take that person’s life, you can’t reverse that. It’s irreversible.”
Though Bell has never sought death as Hampton’s top prosecutor, he has long said he would do it if the facts warranted it. But Bell — also part of the progressive prosecutors’ group — said last week that he’d be “fine with it” if the death penalty were off the table.
“I think the stomach for death penalty cases has diminished tremendously,” Bell said.
Wise County Commonwealth’s Attorney C.H. “Chuck” Slemp III said that though he respects whatever the legislature does, “there are some pretty heinous horrible, just outrageous, vile offenses, where maybe it’s appropriate.”
Slemp talked of the case of Robert Gleason, who was serving a life sentence for a 2007 killing in Amherst County when he strangled his cellmate to death in 2009. Then, while being kept in isolation in 2010, Gleason “lured another inmate over to his isolation cage” and “managed to choke this guy to death and kill him,” too.
Gleason argued with his defense lawyers wanting to keep him alive, Slemp said, and would say, “If you don’t kill me, I’m going to keep killing others.” Gleason was executed in 2013.
Many have argued that the cost of death penalty prosecutions is exorbitant when all the safeguards, additional lawyers and years of appeals are added up. “This is an extraordinarily expensive way to invest our public resources that could be better spent in other ways that would deter and prevent crime,” Surovell said at the committee hearing.
Michael Stone, the executive director for the Virginians for the Alternatives to the Death Penalty, is optimistic about the bill’s chances, saying the same concern jurors have getting a verdict wrong is on the minds of many state lawmakers, too.
“Legislators are very aware of those exonerations and how our system doesn’t always get it right,” Stone said. “And there’s a lot of worries on both sides of the aisle about the possibility of executing an innocent person.”
Peter Dujardin, 757-247-4749, pdujardin@dailypress.com
