Illustration by Victoria Borges
For Rachel Sutphin, the execution of her father’s killer didn’t bring a sense of solace or retribution. Instead, it only reminded her of past trauma and uncovered what she now sees as an immoral institution.
“The death penalty itself has never felt comfortable for me because it’s the state killing someone as punishment for killing someone, in hopes of preventing more killings later,” Sutphin says. “Instead of there being any justice and redemption, there’s just more death.”
Her father, Montgomery County Sheriff’s Deputy Cpl. Eric Sutphin, was one of two men who were killed in 2006 by William Morva during an attempted escape from state custody. After learning that Morva suffered from severe mental illness, Sutphin began advocating publicly for ending the death penalty when former Gov. Terry McAuliffe denied Morva’s petition for clemency in 2017.
With advocates like Sutphin in mind, the Virginia General Assembly approved legislation to end capital punishment in the commonwealth, with Gov. Ralph Northam signing the bill into law on March 24, more than four centuries after the first execution in American history took place at Jamestown. Virginia is now the 23rd state to ban the practice.
There have been more executions in Virginia's history than in any other state —1,390 Virginians have been executed since 1608. However, there hasn’t been a new death sentence in Virginia since 2011, and Morva was the last person to be executed here, in 2017.
Del. Mike Mullin (D-Newport News), who introduced one of two bills seeking to end the practice, says the risk of executing an innocent person through his work as a prosecutor in Hampton has kept him awake at night. According to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), 185 former death-row prisoners in the U.S. have been exonerated of all charges since 1973.
“First and foremost, this is a profoundly racist institution, and you cannot extricate the death penalty from racism,” Mullin says.
Virginia’s record of executions reveals a history of racial disparity. According to DPIC, state laws in the 1800s codified capital crimes by race so that Black Virginians could receive a death sentence for a much broader range of crimes than white defendants. Virginia executed 73 Black men for rape, attempted rape or robbery from 1900 to 1969, a period in which no white men were executed for those same crimes.
LaKeisha Cook, criminal justice reform organizer for the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy, says Virginia’s racially uneven history with executions can be directly linked to slavery and lynchings during the Jim Crow era. Cook coalesced the support of hundreds of Virginia churches to advocate for death penalty abolition, including broad support from the Black faith community. Cook and others hope to see the end of the death penalty spur further moves toward a more equitable criminal justice system.
“When our faith leaders understood that direct connection and were armed with the statistics of how many African Americans have been disproportionately impacted by capital punishment … they [agreed to] join voices with everyone else in saying that it’s time for abolition,” Cook says.
This article has been updated to correct the total number of executions in Virginia’s history.
