The bill, which the Virginia House and Senate passed last month, stipulates that the sentences of the remaining death convicts are to be converted into life imprisonment without eligibility for parole. Prisoners will also not be entitled to a subsidy for good conduct, sentence credits or parole. Where there were dozens of prisoners on death row in the state before, there will now be none. The last man to be executed by the state was William Morva, a fugitive prisoner who killed an unarmed security guard at the hospital and a corporal who participated in his hunt. He was executed in 2017.
On Wednesday, state senator Scott Surovell, a Democrat, visited the execution chamber for the first time since the early 1990s, when he visited the facility as a fellow governor. The stretcher was new, Surovell said, adding that the same wooden chair remained, but that there were also at least two digital clocks on the white walls that he did not remember.
One hundred and two prisoners have been executed in that chamber since its inauguration in 1991, according to the governor’s office. Surovell, who introduced the legislation in the Senate, said the stretcher and chair should be on display in a museum.
“People are going to look at them and say, ‘What the hell were these people thinking about doing this?’” He said. He compared the historic use of the death penalty in Virginia to the spasm of executions by the Trump administration in its final months.
Todd C. Peppers, a professor at Roanoke College who has written extensively on the death penalty in Virginia, said the Supreme Court has long served as a more significant control over the use of the death penalty by the state than any change in public opinion. In 2000, the state executed a 17-year-old man when he murdered his girlfriend’s parents. About five years later, the Federal Supreme Court ruled that the execution of minors at the time of the crimes was unconstitutional. In addition, a case in Virginia led the Supreme Court in 2002 to abolish the death penalty for people with intellectual disabilities.
“It’s a long and bloody story, and it’s surprising that a state like Virginia, a former Confederate state, a state that has embraced the death penalty so enthusiastically, is abolishing it,” said Peppers. “I never thought I would see that.”