Twenty-One Virginia Prosecutors Sign Letter Urging Repeal of Death Penalty

Calling the death penal­ty ​“a failed gov­ern­ment pro­gram,” 21 cur­rent and for­mer Virginia pros­e­cu­tors have signed on to a let­ter to the commonwealth’s General Assembly urg­ing the leg­is­la­ture to abol­ish cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. The let­ter was signed by for­mer Attorneys General Mark L. Earley, Sr., a Republican who presided over 36 exe­cu­tions dur­ing 13 years in office, and Democrat William G. Broaddus, nine cur­rent or for­mer Commonwealth’s Attorneys elect­ed across the state, and 12 oth­er for­mer homicide prosecutors. 

“As pros­e­cu­tors with dif­fer­ent beliefs and back­grounds, we do not all agree on the moral­i­ty of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment,” the let­ter says. ​“However, all of us do agree on the pub­lic pol­i­cy goal of death penal­ty repeal.” Repeal bills have been intro­duced in both cham­bers of the leg­is­la­ture. The Senate Judiciary Committee includ­ed the repeal bill, SB 449, in a slate of bills heard February 3, 2020, and the House Courts of Justice Committee is expect­ed to con­sid­er its ver­sion of the bill, HB 85, lat­er in the week. 

The let­ter high­lights the geo­graph­i­cal­ly arbi­trary appli­ca­tion of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment across Virginia and juries’ increas­ing reluc­tance to impose it. ​“Nearly two-thirds of Virginia juris­dic­tions have not pur­sued a death sen­tence in over 50 years,” the pros­e­cu­tors wrote. ​“Virginia juries have not imposed a death sen­tence in over eight years.” 

The pros­e­cu­tors empha­size sev­er­al fac­tors they believe call for repeal: the high cost of death-penal­ty cas­es, the arbi­trary appli­ca­tion of death sen­tences, the risk of wrong­ful con­vic­tions, and the lack of deter­rent effect. ​“Whether the death penal­ty is ​‘right’ or ​‘wrong,’ we all con­clude that there is a more cost-effec­tive, con­sti­tu­tion­al way to respond to the most heinous crimes: a sen­tence of life in prison with­out the pos­si­bil­i­ty of parole,” they say. ​“Life with­out parole sen­tences help pre­serve our lim­it­ed resources, give more final­i­ty to vic­tim fam­i­lies, and leave the oppor­tu­ni­ty to free the wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed. Most impor­tant­ly, a life with­out parole sen­tence ensures that the most dan­ger­ous crim­i­nals can nev­er threat­en the pub­lic again, and that they will die in prison with­out any fan­fare or publicity.” 

Repeal, they write, will also free up ​“fur­ther resources for crime vic­tims around the Commonwealth” and alle­vi­ate the recur­ring pain expe­ri­enced by vic­tims’ fam­i­lies as a result of the ​“poten­tial mul­ti-decade wait between a death sen­tence and exe­cu­tion,” if the sen­tence is even­tu­al­ly carried out. 

Seven cur­rent Commonwealth’s Attorneys joined the Attorneys General in their call for repeal, includ­ing two pros­e­cu­tors whose juris­dic­tions have active cap­i­tal cas­es. Three recent­ly elect­ed pros­e­cu­tors – Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, Jim Hingeley, and Steve Descano – explic­it­ly cam­paigned against the death penal­ty. The let­ter was also signed by Amy Ashworth, the new­ly elect­ed Commonwealth’s Attorney in Prince William County, which has his­tor­i­cal­ly been one of the most active death-penal­ty juris­dic­tions in Virginia. It ranked among the 2% of U.S. coun­ties respon­si­ble for a major­i­ty of all exe­cu­tions as of 2013. 

On January 30, the Virginia Senate passed SB 116, a mea­sure that would pro­hib­it the death penal­ty for defen­dants with severe men­tal ill­ness, on a bipar­ti­san 32 – 7 vote. No one has been sen­tenced to death in Virginia since 2011, and only three pris­on­ers remained on death row as of October 1, 2019.