Virginia
It took Virginia 400 years to end the death penalty. It’s not a switch we can flip on and off. – Virginia Mercury
Of all the things policymakers can be indecisive about, the death penalty shouldn’t be one of them. It is, after all, about the most profound and irreversible thing a government can do.
Yet this year, not three years after Virginia banned capital punishment, freshman Del. Tim Griffin, R-Bedford, submitted a bill to reinstate it. Mercifully, it was doomed from the outset in the Democratic-ruled House of Delegates. With all due allowances for naïveté, political posturing or whatever Griffin’s motivation, the death penalty isn’t a light switch you flip on and off.
It took Virginia more than 400 years to end capital punishment. When the General Assembly finally did it in 2021, there was even miniscule Republican buy-in on final votes that made Virginia the only former Confederate state to dismantle death row in favor of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for the most heinous offenses.
Ours is among 23 states that have abolished the death penalty. Six others have halted executions by governors’ orders. Only five states executed people last year, and death sentences were imposed in just seven states, according to the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center.
Things were once quite different. Until this century, Virginia was an enthusiastic death penalty backer and practitioner. Since Jamestown, Virginia has executed an estimated 1,300 people.
The U.S. Supreme Court halted capital punishment in the latter third of the 20th century after it found its disparate implementation unconstitutionally “cruel and unusual.” After the court reinstated it in 1976, Virginia executed 113 inmates, according to the DPIC. That ranks third behind Texas (586) and Oklahoma (123) — body counts that will soon grow.
Why did Kiki Webb have to die?
Just the suggestion that a candidate might not support killing people to prove that killing people is wrong was politically disqualifying. It was a common Republican tactic to force Democratic candidates in statewide general elections to pledge support for the death penalty, putting them at odds with many in their own base to remain viable with the broader electorate.
In this century, Republicans failed to notice that Virginia’s appetite for state-sanctioned killings was waning and had been for some time. Part of that is because of demographic changes, especially in the moderate, educated, affluent and fast-growing suburbs.
Another factor was a by-product of a hugely successful Republican initiative that George Allen brought to the governor’s office from his 1993 election landslide.
After the General Assembly overwhelmingly enacted Allen’s abolition of parole in 1994, it meant that an inmate sentenced to life in prison would actually spend the rest of his life in prison. For jurors, that assurance eased the moral crisis they felt when deciding whether to prescribe death for a person sitting steps away from them. Assured that the convict could never walk free again, jurors increasingly eschewed death sentences and the haunting knowledge that they played a role in taking someone’s life.
The numbers tell the story. After the court-ordered hiatus, it took a few years for new death penalty convictions to exhaust their federal and state appeals. Executions resumed in Virginia in 1982. For the rest of that decade, eight people perished in the state’s death chamber. During the 1990s, however, the decade parole was abolished, the total soared to 58. From 2000 through 2009, the total was cut in half, to just 28. And from 2010 through 2017, the year William Morva became the last convict executed in Virginia, it dropped to eight.
The ’90s were also the most robust decade for executions nationally, peaking with 98 in 1999, according to the DPIC.
Death penalty politics reached a significant political flashpoint in Virginia’s 2005 gubernatorial race between Democrat Tim Kaine, the lieutenant governor at the time and now a U.S. senator, and Republican Jerry Kilgore, who had been the state’s attorney general. In a Kilgore campaign ad, the grieving father of a murder victim claimed that Kaine, a lawyer who had defended a death penalty client and a Roman Catholic with a faith-based objection to the death penalty, would have spared Adolf Hitler from execution.
The ad was widely panned as a gratuitous, tone-deaf overreach, and it boomeranged on Kilgore’s campaign as it was already imploding. Kaine quickly aired a rebuttal in which he spoke directly into the camera and said that he would “carry out death sentences imposed by Virginia juries because that’s the law.”
And he did — 11 times from the day he took office in January 2006 through the end of his term four years later. The last to be executed under Kaine’s watch was John Allan Muhammad, convicted as one of the two snipers who terrorized Virginia, the District of Columbia and Maryland in 2002, shooting 10 people dead and injuring three.
Capital punishment is an emotional issue that almost evenly divides the nation. A 2023 Gallup poll showed that 50% of those surveyed said they felt the death penalty is unfairly applied compared to 47% who felt it was fairly applied.
Consider the obvious: Very few people of means go to death row. It’s a different story if you’re Black or poor. Of the 113 executed Virginia inmates, 52 of them — 46% — were Black, a ratio more than double the state’s Black population of 20%. For defendants who can’t afford skilled, experienced death-penalty litigators, the odds are even worse.
Is our criminal justice system so infallible that it should green-light actions as irrevocable as taking another person’s life? Hardly.
According to the DPIC, 196 people sentenced to death nationally since 1973 have been exonerated, including Virginia’s Earl Washington Jr., who was poor and Black. Washington, with an IQ of 69, spent 16 years incarcerated — nine on death row, once within days of being executed — because of false and misleading forensic evidence, woeful trial counsel and his own coerced confession. Gov. Doug Wilder commuted his sentence to life imprisonment in 1993. Gov. Jim Gilmore pardoned Washington in 2000 after DNA testing, not available at the time of his trial in 1984, exonerated him from the murder and rape for which he was convicted.
Griffin’s misbegotten bid to restore capital punishment foundered just before an Alabama execution underscored misgivings Americans increasingly harbor about terminal punishment more suited to despotic regimes.
Virginia abolished biased, inefficient, botched executions; more states should follow suit
Like many states unable to procure the drugs necessary to execute people by lethal injection, Alabama tested a novel way to kill: subjecting the condemned – strapped to a gurney – to pure nitrogen, depriving him of oxygen. Alabama’s attorney general called it “a textbook execution,” promised further hypoxia executions in Alabama and offered to tutor other states in its use.
Associated Press writer Kim Chandler, a witness to the execution, described something much more unnerving. For about two minutes, according to AP’s first-person account, condemned murderer Kenneth Eugene Smith shook and writhed violently, “in thrashing spasms and seizure-like movements,” the force of which “caused the gurney to visibly move at least once.”
There’s no way to inflict death on a confined, terrified human being that doesn’t horrify an ordinary person. That’s because no matter the method — an intravenous drip of lethal drugs, electrical voltage, a noose, a firing squad or nitrogen gas — the end result is a fresh corpse. Each is just as final, its victims just as eternally dead.
If those methods knot your stomach, then maybe our conversations should be about whether governments should execute people, not how.
Virginia
Con artists stole jewelry worn by women in Northern Virginia. Police are asking for help finding them – WTOP News
Several people used sleight of hand to steal jewelry worn by women in Northern Virginia, and police in Fairfax County are asking for the public’s help to find the suspects.
Several people used sleight of hand to steal jewelry worn by women in Northern Virginia, and police in Fairfax County are asking for the public’s help in finding the suspects.
The robberies began at 1:30 p.m. on March 20 and followed a similar pattern. According to police, suspects described as women in SUVs would approach other women in parking lots, start conversations and offer them jewelry.
As the suspects placed costume jewelry on the women, they would use sleight of hand to remove the women’s real jewelry, driving off before the victims knew what happened, police said.
Troopers in Delaware detained and identified those inside the Toyota, including Cristina Milhaela Paun, 21, of Baltimore. She was then let go.
Detectives in Fairfax County said they have since identified Paun as a suspect in two of the March 20 thefts and obtained warrants for felony pickpocketing and robbery. She is wanted, and police are asking the public for information regarding her whereabouts.
The exact times and locations of each theft are listed below:
- 1:30 p.m., 6900 block of Hechinger Drive in Springfield (white SUV, Paun identified as a suspect)
- 1:30 p.m., 13900 block of Metrotech Drive in Chantilly (black SUV)
- 3:30 p.m., 12900 block of Wood Crescent Circle near Herndon (white SUV, Paun identified as a suspect)
- 3:55 p.m., 6800 block of Commerce Street in Franconia (black SUV, two suspects, described as a 50-year-old woman with red hair and gold teeth and a 25-year-old woman wearing a headscarf). Video of this incident can be seen below.
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When early voting on the proposed redistricting amendment began, the General Assembly was still in session, so one pretty March day Del. Joe McNamara walked outside the State Capitol and recorded a short video to post on social media in which he urged a “no” vote.
“This amendment will not only take power away from the local people,” the Roanoke County Republican said. “It will consolidate power in Northern Virginia.”
McNamara was being mild.
Del. Wren Williams, a fellow Republican from Patrick County, posted a social media message about what he called “Fairfaxphobia,” which he described as “A distrust or fear that political power concentrated in Fairfax County is dominating decisions for the entire Commonwealth and imposing policies on communities that they cannot afford.”
That, too, was mild compared with the video being circulated by the Freedom Caucus Fund, an offshoot of the conservative caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives. “Fairfax is a Sanctuary County with Virginia’s most insane Trans, Sex Ed and DEI policies,” the video says. “And if you don’t vote, they’ll control FIVE Virginia Congress Seats. Stop them.” The audio plays over images of protesters holding signs that say “Love Trans Kids” and, just for good measure, the proposed redistricting map is displayed in rainbow colors.
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A screenshot from the Freedom Caucus Fund ad.Then there are the signs now appearing up and down the Shenandoah Valley that proclaim: “Don’t Fairfax Me.” The most prominent one is on a barn beside Interstate 81 just south of Harrisonburg where 29,000 or more drivers see it every day.
The name of Virginia’s most populous county is now being invoked as a verb in rural Virginia to argue against the proposed redistricting amendment.
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One of the signs in Southwest Virginia. Courtesy of Mark Obenshain.We’re accustomed to candidates badmouthing one another or parties doing the same. Here’s a case where one of the main arguments employed by the “no” side, at least in certain rural parts of the state, is to run against a different part of the state. Even parts of Southwest Virginia where the redistricting map would leave voters in a Republican district, eight billboards have appeared urging: “Vote No” to a “Northern Virginia Power Grab.” They’re paid for by “Friends of Dr. Todd Pillion,” the Republican state senator who represents the region.
It’s hard enough to explain to the casual voter the multiyear process by which constitutional amendments are passed in Virginia, and perhaps even harder to explain redistricting even in more normal times. But invoking the specter of consolidating “power in Northern Virginia” might be a pretty powerful trigger for some conservative rural voters who are predisposed to see Northern Virginia as the reason why there’s a Democratic majority in the legislature passing bills they don’t like.
By that measure, “Don’t Fairfax Me” might be the clearest, punchiest campaign slogan that Virginia has seen since Jim Gilmore was swept into the governor’s office in 1997 on a platform of “No Car Tax!” We’ll see April 21 how effective it is.
The factual basis for “Don’t Fairfax Me” and the general campaign against Fairfax County and Northern Virginia as the villain in this political drama is political math. Northern Virginia is the state’s largest metro area; it’s also reliably Democratic. Right now Northern Virginia has three of the state’s 11 congressional districts, while a fourth contains part of Northern Virginia. For Democrats to maximize their power under redistricting (and conversely minimize Republican power), they needed to stretch those Northern Virginia districts into the Republican strongholds of the Shenandoah Valley and the Piedmont — to essentially “bury” those Republicans into districts dominated by Northern Virginia.
That’s why the proposed map has such elongated districts snaking out of Northern Virginia.
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Virginia’s current congressional districts, approved in late 2021. Courtesy of Twotwofourtysix. 100vw, 780px”/><figcaption class=)
This is the proposed map, as amended. Courtesy of Legislative Information Services.
From three districts wholly based in Northern Virginia and a fourth partially in Northern Virginia, we would now have five districts partially in Northern Virginia. Both Fairfax and Prince William County would be split among five different districts. In four of those (the 1st, 8th, 10th and 11th), Fairfax County would be the biggest locality, although those vote shares range from 24.4% in the 1st to 49.94% in the 11th. In the fifth, the proposed 8th District, Fairfax would be the third-biggest locality, at 12.9%, with Alexandria and Prince William County being the top two.
Got question about redistricting?
If the answer’s not on our Voter Guide, let us know and we’ll see if we can get it answered.
At present, there’s just one member of the U.S. House from Fairfax County: James Walkinshaw in the 11th. The other Northern Virginia members are from Prince William County (Eugene Vindman in the 7th), Alexandria (Don Beyer in the 8th) and Loudoun County (Suhas Subramanyam in the 10th). In practice, that likely wouldn’t change much in the short term, given the power of incumbency. In theory, though, we could wind up with five House members from the same county, albeit one with a population north of 1 million. Or, conversely, we could wind up with none.
In any case, Fairfax is now a verb, and a pejorative one in the context in which it’s being used. How do people in Fairfax feel about some of their fellow Virginians using their locality’s name in such a way? I didn’t have time to interview all 1.1 million residents of Fairfax County, but I did make contact with two people who have been entrusted with the power to speak for some of them.
One of those is Jeff McKay, the chairman of the county board of supervisors and, yes, a Democrat. Here’s what he sent me:
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Jeff McKay, chairman of Fairfax County Board of Supervisors. Courtesy of Fairfax County.“As your reporting has noted, Fairfax County and Northern Virginia play a significant role in funding the rest of the state, from roads and schools to law enforcement. We are a major economic engine for the commonwealth, and it is unclear why that would be seen as a negative, especially for those statewide beneficiaries. Politics can unfortunately rely on pitting one part of the state against another, an old trick that does a disservice to Virginians. This is a distraction meant to make voters think this is about an in-state rivalry and to divert attention from the harmful policies of the Trump Administration. I understand why some would want to distract from that record. This is not about one part of the state versus another. It is about whether Virginians believe the Trump Administration needs to be checked and whether its policies have damaged Virginia’s economy, from sky-high gas prices and tariffs, to impacts on federal workers and contractors, to threats to the rule of law. Virginia families have been hit hard, and that issue is far more important than pitting parts of the state against each other. The stakes are simply too high at this moment in our country’s history for that to decide this vote.”
You can feel however you wish to feel about redistricting, but McKay is undeniably correct on one point: The most rural (and therefore the most Republican) parts of Virginia are financially dependent on Fairfax County and, more broadly, all of Northern Virginia.
The go-to example: school funding. Rural schools (and also some non-rural schools) get most of their funding from the state (in some places, north of 60%). Where does the state get that money? The single biggest source of tax revenue is Northern Virginia; it accounts for about 42% of the state’s general fund tax revenue. According to the state Department of Taxation, Fairfax County residents account for 22.9% of the income taxes paid in Virginia. In second place, Loudoun County, with 8.1%. If money talked (and sometimes it does), Fairfax County would have the loudest say in how Virginia spends that money.
Of course, that’s not exactly what those putting up “Don’t Fairfax Me” are talking about, but it is a useful reminder of how the state’s economy works. Rural Virginia wants Fairfax’s money, just not its politics.
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Pat Herrity, the only Republican on the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors. Courtesy of Herrity.On the other side of the spectrum is Fairfax’s lone Republican supervisor, Pat Herrity, who briefly sought the GOP nomination for lieutenant governor last year until he was sidelined by heart-related health issues. During a phone call, he told me he’s now recovered (thanks to two new aortas) and is back to playing hockey in a local adult league, which is not something most heart patients do.
After we dispensed with those pleasantries, we got down to business. Fairfax as a verb? “It’s the life I live every day,” he told me. “If I were in rural Virginia, I wouldn’t want a bunch of Fairfax or Northern Virginia Democrats controlling my congressional representation or being my congressional representative. I think it’s bad from a tax standpoint, bad from a regulatory standpoint, bad from a public safety standpoint, bad from an affordability standpoint — a lot of bads.” He then proceeded to list lots of policy disagreements he had with the Democrats on the Fairfax board.
Likewise, the chair of the Fairfax County Republicans had no problem with anyone who wants to run against Fairfax County to defeat the redistricting amendment. “Totally fair,” Katie Gorka said. “I feel people have every right to be upset. I don’t have bad feelings about it. I know people love to hate us.”
We’ll find out April 21 just how much.
For more on redistricting, see our Voter Guide. For more political news and analysis, sign up for West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter that comes out on Friday. This week I’ll have another update on the early voting numbers. Sign up here:
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