Commentary: Repealing Death Penalty ​‘Essential to Racial Healing’ in Virginia

Recent police and vigilante killings of Black Americans have ignited a national call for systemic reform of law enforcement across the country, highlighting the link between extrajudicial abuse of force and widespread discriminatory application of unnecessarily harsh legal punishments against people of color. In the wake of these murders, Maryland public defender Kristina Leslie (pictured) writes, “[m]eaningful and equitable criminal justice reform … must include abolishing the death penalty.”

Leslie, who also serves as president of Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, authored an op-ed, Death penalty repeal is essential to racial healing, published July 2, 2020 in The Richmond Times-Dispatch. Her commentary explains how Virginia’s death penalty fits into its history of racial injustice and why the abolition of capital punishment is a critical element of the movement toward racial equity. “For generations,” she says, this country’s failure to effectively combat, or even confront, systemic racism has resulted in the brutal, discriminatory treatment of Black and brown people. Nowhere is racial bigotry more insidious than in the application of America’s harshest punishment — death.”

Leslie traces Virginia’s death penalty history, linking it to lynchings and other injustices and explaining how “racial bias inextricably is tied to the death penalty.” Virginia, the site of the first execution in what is now the United States, has performed 1,390 documented executions since 1608. Of those, “only four involved a white defendant killing a Black victim — all since 1997. This data suggests that Black lives are undervalued.”

A DPIC review of Virginia execution data from the 20^th century demonstrates the historically discriminatory application of capital punishment against African Americans in Virginia. DPIC found that from 1900 to 1970, Virginia executed 73 people for rape, attempted rape, or robbery not resulting in death. Every one of those executed was African American.

Leslie’s op-ed spotlights several appalling instances of racism in the Commonwealth’s use of the death penalty. “One egregious case occurred in 1949,” she writes, “when seven young Black men were charged in Martinsville with the rape of a white woman. All seven men — several falsely threatened into confessing with nonexistent lynch mobs — were convicted of rape, and aiding and abetting rape by white juries, then assembly-line electrocuted on two separate days.” She notes that “[i]n stark contrast, at the same time as the Martinsville cases, the Norfolk Journal reported that a white Virginia man named Murrel Dudley was convicted of raping a ‘feeble-minded colored woman.’ He was fined $20.”

Leslie describes continuing racial disparities, including in the settings for capital trials and the personnel who carry them out. “Capital defendants in the commonwealth are restrained by waist chains and leg irons while seated in a courtroom adorned with portraits commemorating men of the Confederacy,” she writes. “Typically, the judge, prosecutors and defense attorneys all are white. As a Black lawyer, I am profoundly aware that my client and I are the only minorities in the room.”

Despite its history, Virginia is moving away from the death penalty. It has not executed anyone since 2017, and no one has been sentenced to death in nearly a decade. Governor Ralph Northam has said he would sign an abolition bill, and, earlier in 2020, the Virginia legislature enacted a new law making public the identities of companies that provide execution drugs to the state.

“Meaningful and equitable criminal justice reform, born in the wake of the recent police murders of Black Americans and subsequent protests, must include abolishing the death penalty,” Leslie concludes. “Virginia has the opportunity to be the first Southern state to abolish capital punishment to correct the wrongs of the past and advance toward a more just, equitable and unbiased tomorrow.”