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      Pleas for clemency grow ahead of Ernest Lee Johnson’s execution

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      MissouriPleas for clemency grow ahead of Ernest Lee Johnson’s execution Missouri Democrats Cori Bush and Emanuel Cleaver II join Pope in calls to governor for sentence to be set aside Edward HelmoreMon 4 Oct 2021 06.00 EDTLast modified on Mon 4 Oct 2021 10.27 EDTPleas for clemency on behalf of Ernest Lee Johnson, who was convicted of a 1994 murder, are growing more frantic ahead of his scheduled execution by lethal injection in Missouri on Tuesday after the Pope and two members of the US Congress issued calls for the sentence to be set aside.In a statement last week, Pope Francis requested clemency for Johnson in a letter to Missouri governor Michael Parson. The letter did not deny that “grave crimes such as his deserve grave punishment” but called on Parson to consider “the simple fact of Mr Johnson’s humanity and the sacredness of all human life.” If carried out it will be the first execution by Missouri since May 2020.The Pope’s call for clemency has been joined by two of Missouri’s Democratic members of Congress, Cori Bush and Emanuel Cleaver II, who petitioned the governor to halt the execution.Bush and Cleaver, both members of the Congressional Black Caucus, urged the governor to acknowledge “the moral depravity of executions” and argued that Johnson’s execution perpetuates the same cycles of trauma and violence against Black people as “slavery and lynching did before it”.“The fact of the matter is that these death sentences are not about justice. They are about who has institutional power and who doesn’t,” they wrote. “Like slavery and lynching did before it, the death penalty perpetuates cycles of trauma, violence and state-sanctioned murder in Black and brown communities.”Advocates for the condemned man, including Bush and Cleaver, say that he has had developmental delays since birth, when he was born with fetal alcohol syndrome to a mother who battled addiction. Johnson, 61, has also had an operation to take out a tumor that removed as much as 20% of his brain tissue, the AP reported, which advocates say has further reduced his intellectual capacity.Johnson’s public defender, Jeremy Weis, has said that Johnson has scored between 67 and 77 in IQ tests and “meets all statutory and clinical definitions” of intellectual disability. Missouri law broadly defines intellectual disability as “substantial limitations in general functioning.”But last month, the Missouri supreme court ruled that Johnson is not, as he claims, intellectually disabled and denied his request for execution by firing squad based on his claim that death by lethal injection would cause severe pain.Johnson’s death sentence stems from February 1994 when he walked into a general store near his home in northeast Columbia and bludgeoned, stabbed, and shot three employees, Mary Bratcher, 46; Mable Scruggs, 57; and Fred Jones, 58, before hiding their bodies in a walk-in cooler and robbing the store for drug money.Johnson’s scheduled execution has highlighted racial and social inequities in the application of justice. Issuing a call for clemency, the Kansas City Star’s editorial board noted that Parson had swiftly pardoned Mark and Patricia McCloskey, a white St Louis couple who plead guilty to assault after waving weapons at Black Lives Matter demonstrators last year.The board criticized the governor for failing to convene a board of inquiry but said it did not “even dare to hope that the evidence that Johnson today has the awareness of a child might convince our governor to commute his sentence”.It added: “When the state, our state, does kill this man, as it almost certainly will, it will be yet another indictment of a system so bloodthirsty that it delights in vengeance against those who don’t even know why they’re being punished.”TopicsMissouriCapital punishmentUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Garland Says Watchdog Is Best Positioned to Review Trump-Era Justice Dept., Not Him

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      The attorney general said that various inspector general inquiries would help uncover any wrongdoing and that he wanted to avoid politicizing the work of career officials.WASHINGTON — Attorney General Merrick B. Garland backed away on Tuesday from doing a broad review of Justice Department politicization during the Trump administration, noting that the department’s independent inspector general was already investigating related issues, including aggressive leak hunts and attempts to overturn the election.Democrats and some former Justice Department employees have pressed Mr. Garland to uncover any efforts by former President Donald J. Trump to wield the power of federal law enforcement to advance his personal agenda. Their calls for a full investigation grew louder after recent revelations that Mr. Trump pushed department officials to help him undo his election loss and that prosecutors took aggressive steps to root out leakers.Answering questions from reporters at the Justice Department on Tuesday, Mr. Garland said that reviewing the previous administration’s actions was “a complicated question.” He noted that managers typically sought to understand what previous leaders had done.“We always look at what happened before,” he said. But he stopped short of saying that he would undertake a comprehensive review of Trump era Justice Department officials and their actions, in part to keep career employees from concluding that their work would be judged through changing political views.“I don’t want the department’s career people to think that a new group comes in and immediately applies a political lens,” Mr. Garland said.He also invoked the investigations by the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, noting that they spoke to the question of whether Mr. Trump had improperly used the department’s powers to investigate and prosecute.“It’s his job to look at these things,” Mr. Garland said of Mr. Horowitz. “He’s very good at this — let us know when there are problems and what changes should be made, if they should be. I don’t want to prejudge anything. It’s just not fair to the current employees.”Mr. Horowitz said this month that he was investigating decisions by federal prosecutors to secretly seize reporters’ phone records in investigations of leaks of classified information to the press early in the Trump administration.Mr. Horowitz is also examining subpoenas to Apple for subscriber information that ultimately belonged to House Democrats, including Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Mr. Schiff had called on Mr. Garland last week to do a “top-to-bottom review of the degree to which the department was politicized during the previous administration and take corrective steps.”The inspector general is also examining whether current or former Justice Department officials improperly attempted to use the department to undo the election results, following reports that at least one former official pushed leaders to do so. And he is looking into whether Trump administration officials improperly pressured the former U.S. attorney in Atlanta, Byung J. Pak, to resign over his decision not to take actions that would cast doubt on the results of the election.Mr. Garland also said in a statement this month that the deputy attorney general, Lisa O. Monaco, was looking for “potentially problematic matters deserving high-level review.” But he made clear that she was not undertaking the kind of full investigation that critics of the Trump administration have called for.Mr. Garland also told reporters that he planned to issue a memo on the federal death penalty in the coming weeks, which the Trump administration had revived after nearly two decades of disuse. President Biden has said he opposes the federal death penalty.“I have been personally reviewing the processes of the department,” Mr. Garland said. “I expect before too long to have a statement.” More

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      Arizona ‘refurbishes’ its gas chamber to prepare for executions, documents reveal

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      The state of Arizona is preparing to kill death row inmates using hydrogen cyanide, the same lethal gas that was deployed at Auschwitz.Documents obtained by the Guardian reveal that Arizona’s department of corrections has spent more than $2,000 in procuring the ingredients to make cyanide gas. The department bought a solid brick of potassium cyanide in December for $1,530.It also purchased sodium hydroxide pellets and sulfuric acid which are intended to be used to generate the deadly gas. The gas chamber itself, built in 1949 and disused for 22 years, has been dusted off and, according to the department, “refurbished”.Over the past few months the Republican-controlled state has moved aggressively to restart its deeply flawed execution system. The death penalty has been in abeyance in Arizona for seven years following the gruesomely botched lethal injection of Joseph Wood in 2014.Last month, the Guardian revealed that Arizona spent a jaw-dropping $1.5m on a batch of pentobarbital in October, a sedative which it now hopes to use as its main lethal injection method.The Guardian’s documents, obtained through public records requests, show that officials have also gone to considerable lengths to revive the state’s mothballed gas chamber, housed at ASPC-Florence. A series of tests were conducted last August to appraise its “operability”.Seals on windows and the door were checked to ensure airtightness, and drains cleared of blockage. Water was used in the tests in place of the deadly chemicals, with a smoke grenade ignited to simulate the gas.Some of the techniques used to test the safety of the chamber were astonishingly primitive, the documents reveal. Prison officials checked for gas seepages with a candle.The flame of the candle was held up to the sealed windows and door and if its flame remained steady and did not flicker the chamber was deemed to be airtight. In December staff declared the vessel “operationally ready”.The preparation of cyanide gas executions presents Arizona death row inmates with a Hobson’s choice between two questionable ways to die. Should they opt for the gas chamber, they should be mindful of the last time anybody was gassed by the state.Walter LaGrand, a German national, was sentenced to death for a 1982 bungled armed bank robbery in which a man was killed. The Tucson Citizen published an eyewitness account of his 1999 execution in which he displayed “agonizing choking and gagging” and took 18 minutes to die.“The witness room fell silent as a mist of gas rose, much like steam in a shower, and Walter LaGrand became enveloped in a cloud of cyanide vapor,” the Citizen reported. “He began coughing violently – three or four loud hacks – and made a gagging sound before falling forward.”The newspaper recorded that over many minutes the inmate’s head and arms twitched, and his hands were “red and clenched”.Should an inmate choose death by lethal injection – the method widely deployed among death penalty states as the supposedly scientific and humane alternative to gas, electric chair or firing squad – they will also find the last time it was used in Arizona it was anything but humane.Joseph Wood took almost two hours to die when Arizona experimented on him with 15 doses of a then little-used concoction of lethal injection drugs. An eye witness told the Guardian that he counted Wood gasp and gulp 660 times.In its current rush to restart executions, Arizona has selected two inmates as likely candidates to go first out of a current death row population of 115 people. They are Frank Atwood, 65, sentenced to death for killing an eight-year-old girl, Vicki Lynne Hoskinson, in 1984; and Clarence Dixon, 65, convicted of the 1978 murder of a college student, Deana Bowdoin.A member of Atwood’s legal team, Joseph Perkovich of Phillips Black, told the Guardian that it was improper for the state to be hurrying towards setting an execution date when the pandemic had impeded investigation into his client’s possible innocence for more than a year. As for Atwood’s choice between lethal injection or gas, Perkovich said: “Neither option is tenable.”The attorney pointed out that there is a discrepancy between the potassium cyanide that has been obtained by the corrections department and the state’s execution protocol which stipulates that sodium cyanide must be used. “This is not a small detail – the specific compound is vitally important,” he said.Perkovich added that “Frank Atwood is prepared to die. He is a man of Greek Orthodox faith and is preparing for this moment. But he does not want to be tortured and subjected to a botched execution.”Inmates who choose the gas chamber are strapped into a chair in the centre of the vessel. Coloured levers are then used to drop the sodium cyanide into a pot of sulfuric acid under the chair, releasing the deadly hydrogen cyanide into the air.Once the prisoner is dead, the gas is neutralized with ammonia until the chamber is safe to enter. “As a precautionary method,” the death chamber protocol says, “it is recommended that the team removing the body wear gas masks and rubber gloves and that the hair of the deceased inmate be ruffled in order to allow any residually trapped gas to escape.”The documents record how prison staff engaged in role play during last year’s tests. Guards acted out as inmates who resisted going to their death, screaming: “This is murder”, “I’m innocent”, “You’re putting me down like an animal”, and “This is against everything America stands for”.Despite Arizona’s best efforts to present its gas chamber as a reputable institution, the horrors of the past hang heavily over it. The Nazis used hydrogen cyanide under the trade name Zyklon B to kill more than 1 million people in gas chambers in Auschwitz and other extermination camps.Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said: “You have to wonder what Arizona was thinking in believing that in 2021 it is acceptable to execute people in a gas chamber with cyanide gas. Did they have anybody study the history of the Holocaust?” More

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      Virginia becomes the first southern state to end the death penalty

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      Sign up for the Guardian Today US newsletterVirginia has become the 23rd US state and the first in the south to abolish the death penalty, a dramatic shift for the commonwealth which previously had the nation’s second-highest number of executions.The move was the culmination of a yearslong battle by Democrats who argued the death penalty has been applied disproportionately to people of color, mentally ill people and poor people. Republicans argued that the death penalty should remain a sentencing option for especially heinous crimes and to bring justice to victims and their families.Virginia’s new Democratic majority, in full control of the general assembly for a second year, won the debate last month when the senate and house of delegates passed measures banning capital punishment.The state’s Democratic governor, Ralph Northam, signed the house and senate bills in a ceremony on Wednesday after touring the execution chamber at the Greensville correctional center, where 102 people have been put to death since executions were moved there from the Virginia state penitentiary in the early 1990s.“There is no place today for the death penalty in this commonwealth, in the south or in this nation,” Northam said shortly before signing the legislation.The change is also significant for making Virginia the first state of the former Confederate south to abandon capital punishment. Northam said the death penalty has been disproportionately applied to Black people and is the product of a flawed judicial system. Since 1973, more than 170 people around the country have been released from death row after evidence of their innocence was uncovered, he said.Northam recounted the story of Earl Washington Jr, a Black man who was sentenced to death after being wrongfully convicted of rape and murder in Virginia in 1984. Washington spent more than 17 years in prison before he was exonerated. He came within nine days of being executed.“We can’t give out the ultimate punishment without being 100% sure that we’re right, and we can’t sentence people to that ultimate punishment knowing that the system doesn’t work the same for everyone,” Northam said.Virginia has executed nearly 1,400 people since its days as a colony. In modern times, the state is second only to Texas in the number of executions it has carried out, with 113 since the supreme court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, according to the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center.Only two men remain on Virginia’s death row: Anthony Juniper, who was sentenced to death in the 2004 slayings of his ex-girlfriend, two of her children, and her brother; and Thomas Porter, who was sentenced to die for the 2005 killing of a Norfolk police officer. Their sentences will now be converted to life in prison without parole.In addition to the 23 states that have now abolished the death penalty, three others have moratoriums in place that were imposed by their governors.Robert Dunham, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, and a death penalty opponent, said abolishing executions in Virginia could mark the beginning of the end for capital punishment in the south, where the highest number of prisoners are put to death.“Virginia’s death penalty has deep roots in slavery, lynchings and Jim Crow segregation,” said Dunham. “The symbolic value of dismantling this tool that has been used historically as a mechanism for racial oppression by a legislature sitting in the former capital of the Confederacy can’t be overstated.”During Northam’s tour of the death chamber, he was shown the wooden chair where death row inmates were electrocuted and a metal gurney where they were given lethal injections. He also saw the holding cells where they spent the final days of their lives and had their last meals.“It is a powerful thing to stand in the room where people have been put to death,” Northam told the crowd of lawmakers and death penalty opponents who attended the bill-signing ceremony.“I know that experience will stay with me for the rest of my life, and it reinforced [to] me that signing this new law is the right thing to do.” More

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      Death row inmates await Biden's promise to end federal executions

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      Through notes passed under cell doors with string and conversations whispered through air ducts, death row prisoners in Indiana are debating whether Joe Biden will fulfill his campaign promise to halt federal executions.Biden hasn’t spoken publicly about capital punishment since taking office four days after the Trump administration executed the last of 13 inmates at the penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, where federal death row inmates are held.That six-month run of executions cut the unit from around 63 to 50. Biden’s campaign website said he would work to end federal executions, but he has not specified how.On Monday the supreme court added to potential challenges confronting Biden on the matter, when it said it would consider reinstating the death sentence for the Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.The justices agreed to hear an appeal filed by the Trump administration. The initial prosecution and decision to seek a death sentence was made by the Obama administration, in which Biden was vice-president.In emails with the Associated Press through a prison-monitored system they access in the two hours a day they are let out of their 12ft by 7ft cells, four death row inmates said Biden’s silence has them on edge, wondering if political calculations will lead him to back away from commuting their sentences to life or endorsing legislation striking capital punishment from US statutes.“There’s not a day that goes by that we’re not scanning the news for hints of when or if the Biden administration will take meaningful action to implement his promises,” said Rejon Taylor, 36, who was sentenced to death in 2008 for killing an Atlanta restaurant owner.Everyone on federal death row was convicted of killing someone, victims often suffering brutal deaths. The dead included children, bank workers and prison guards. One inmate, Dylann Roof, killed nine Black members of a South Carolina church during Bible study in 2015. Many Americans believe death is right for such crimes.Views of capital punishment, though, are shifting. One report found people of color overrepresented on death row nationwide. Some 40% of federal death row inmates are Black, compared with about 13% of the US population. Support for the death penalty has waned and fewer executions are carried out. Virginia recently voted to abolish it.The prisoners expressed relief at Donald Trump’s departure after he presided over more federal executions than any president in 130 years. The fear that guards will appear at cell doors to say the warden needed to speak to them – dreaded words that mean an execution is scheduled – has receded.They described death row as a close-knit community. All said they were reeling from seeing friends escorted away for execution by lethal injection.“When it’s quiet here, which it often is, you’ll hear someone say, ‘Damn, I can’t believe they’re gone!’ We all know what they are referencing,” said Daniel Troya, sentenced in 2009 in the drug-related killings of a Florida man, his wife and their two children.The federal executions during the coronavirus pandemic were likely super-spreader events. In December, 70% of the inmates had Covid-19, some possibly infected via the air ducts through which they communicate.The AP attended all 13 executions. Five of the first six inmates executed were white. Six of the last seven were Black, including Dustin Higgs, the final inmate put to death, on 16 January for ordering the killing of three Maryland women.Memories of speaking to Higgs just before his execution still pain Sherman Fields, who is on death row in the killing of his girlfriend.“He kept saying he’s innocent and he didn’t want to die,” Fields, 46, said. “He’s my friend. It was very hard.”The easiest step for Biden would be to simply instruct the justice department not to carry out executions, though that would leave the door open for a future president to resume them. Inmates know Biden, while a senator, played a key role in passing a 1994 crime bill that increased federal crimes for which someone could be put to death.“I don’t trust Biden,” Troya said. “He set the rules to get us all here in the first place.” More

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      'Inhumane and flawed': global business leaders urge governments to end death penalty

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      Global business leaders launched a campaign on Thursday declaring their opposition to the death penalty, urging governments everywhere to end the practice and asking their peers to join them.Speaking to the virtual South by Southwest festival, Sir Richard Branson, one of the campaign’s leaders, said: “The death penalty is broken beyond repair and plainly fails to deliver justice by every reasonable measure. It is marred by cruelty, waste, ineffectiveness, discrimination and an unacceptable risk of error.“By speaking out at this crucial moment, business leaders have an opportunity to help end this inhumane and flawed practice.”Initial signatories of Business Against Death Penalty include billionaires fashion mogul François-Henri Pinault and telecoms tycoon Mo Ibrahim, Ben & Jerry founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, Martha Lane Fox, tech entrepreneur and Twitter board member and Arianna Huffington, co-founder of the Huffington Post.The campaign is being coordinated by the Responsible Business Initiative for Justice, a nonprofit human rights group led by Celia Ouellette, a former death row lawyer. “This campaign is an opportunity for business leaders to embrace their responsibility to speak out authentically on issues of racial and social justice in a way that delivers real impact.”Ouellette said in the light of the business communities support for Black Lives Matter and racial justice there was a growing awareness of the “long history of race and the death penalty among business leaders” and many were now prepared to stand against it.In a statement, Ben & Jerry founders Cohen and Greenfield said: “Business leaders need to do more than just say Black Lives Matter. They need to walk the talk and be instrumental in tearing down all the symbols of structural racism in our society. The death penalty has a long history with oppression, and it needs to end. Now.”Joe Biden is the first US president to openly oppose executions and is under pressure to end the federal death penalty. Ouellette said she was hopeful that the business community could help lobby for change in the same way it helped press for marriage equality in the US and elsewhere.“Bringing powerful voices to the table is highly impactful,” she said.The group plans to build support and increase pressure for change ahead of the World Day Against the Death Penalty on 10 October.More than 170 United Nations member states have now abolished the death penalty in law or practice.Ouellette said the practice was at a “tipping point” and that Biden’s appointment could pave the way for the US to join the countries that have effectively ended it. “I am hopeful,” she said. But she warned that the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, when the government for the first time executed more American civilians than all the states combined, shows what is at stake.“Movements can tip backwards too,” she said. More

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      'We're making our way': how Virginia became the most progressive of the US’s southern states

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      Having lived in Virginia most of his life, Larry Sabato can remember racially segregated schools and systematic efforts to stop Black people voting. Now 68, he observes a state that has diversified, embraced liberal values and shifted from symbol of the old south to symbol of the new.“I have to admit, as a young man I would never have believed it was possible for Virginia to move in such a strong progressive direction,” said Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “I worked for candidates back then who were progressive. I used to joke, ‘If I work for you, you’re going to lose, you have to understand that’. And they always did.“Virginia has taught the country and the world that America can change, and sometimes can change rapidly, and in a very progressive direction.”Two dramatic examples came last month when the state general assembly voted to abolish the death penalty – an extraordinary reversal for a state that has executed more people than any other – and to make Virginia the first southern state to legalise marijuana for adult recreational use.These followed a flurry of measures that put the commonwealth, as it is known, in the vanguard on racial, social and economic issues in the American south. Last year it passed some of the strictest gun laws, loosest abortion restrictions and strongest protections for LGBTQ+ people in the region, as well as its highest minimum wage.Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by 10 points in Virginia in 2020. Its two US senators are Democrats, its governor is a Democrat and last year Democrats took full control of the general assembly for the first time in a quarter of a century.Such a monopoly would once have been unthinkable. Sabato reflected: “It was almost a one-party Republican state.It was Barack Obama in 2008 that finally got hundreds of thousands of young people registered and voting“Virginia had been edging a little bit closer to the Democratic party because of population growth in northern Virginia and Hampton Roads and even the Richmond area. But it was Barack Obama in 2008 that finally got hundreds of thousands of, not just minorities, but also young people registered and voting and we haven’t gone back since.“The Republican party has drifted further to the right. Instead of responding to the changes and bouncing back to the middle, they’ve decided to double down. They’ve lost every single election in this state from 2010 onwards.”Sabato was speaking from his office in Charlottesville, looking out on a statue of Thomas Jefferson, the third president who, like the first, George Washington, was a Virginian. Both founding fathers owned enslaved people on sprawling estates – Monticello and Mount Vernon – that have gone far in recent years to confront that legacy for tourists, historians and children.Virginia’s long and painful history would later include Confederate generals Robert E Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson fighting to preserve slavery and destroy the union. The state capital, Richmond, was the capital of the Confederacy. The south lost the civil war but Virginia remained a bastion of Jim Crow laws that maintained racial apartheid.By the 1990s, however, Virginia had elected the first African American governor in the US and political realignment was being fuelled by growing suburbs. The expansion of Washington spilled into northern Virginia, where voters are more likely to be immigrants, college educated and liberal. Other cities have expanded and diversified. The mayors of Richmond and Charlottesville are African American.Few changes are as totemic as the demise of capital punishment. Virginia had executed nearly 1,400 people since colonial days, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Since 1976, when the US supreme court reinstated the death penalty, it had carried out 113 executions, second only to Texas. But in voting to abolish it last month, Virginia’s general assembly noted that it is applied disproportionately to people of colour, the poor and the mentally ill.The march of progressive values is neither uniform nor irreversible. Virginia’s reforms have provoked resentment in rural areas. Tens of thousands of gun rights activists descended on Richmond last year to protest.A white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017 was a stark reminder of the potential for backlash. Four years later, the statue of Lee at the centre of the protest still stands. Despite last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, a giant Lee monument in Richmond also remains intact.Juli Briskman, a district supervisor in Loudon county, northern Virginia, said: “You don’t have to drive very far to start seeing Trump flags and Confederate flags, and often you see them together. We still have the ‘Don’t tread on me’ licence plate. I’m trying to figure out how we can take that out of the system. So Virginia still has a little ways to go but I think as a ‘southern state’ it is really leading the way right now.I’m thankful that Virginians stuck with me“We’re the first state to pass the Voting Rights Act in the south and that is sitting on the governor’s desk right now. We’ve made a lot of strides in abortion access: last year the general assembly repealed a law that would have required women to get an ultrasound and have certain types of counselling before getting abortion care. We’ve passed a number of gun sense laws in ’20 and ’21, so we’re making our way.”‘He faced the storm’Perhaps no one personifies the often uncomfortable, but seemingly inexorable, transformation of Virginia more than Ralph Northam, the 61-year-old governor. Two years ago the Democrat was engulfed in scandal over a blackface image in his 1984 medical school yearbook. In one disastrous press conference, he seemed ready to accept a reporter’s challenge to perform Michael Jackson’s “moonwalk” dance until his wife interjected that these were “inappropriate circumstances”.Northam faced demands to resign but with his potential successor facing sexual assault allegations, managed to survive. He vowed to focus on racial equality and confronting his own white privilege. He has enthusiastically signed many of the progressive bills passed by the general assembly.Briskman, a Democrat who shot to fame by giving Trump’s motorcade the middle finger while cycling near his golf course, was among those who called for Northam to quit but now believes he has redeemed himself.“If he had resigned, we might not have gotten as much done,” she said. “It goes a long way toward reconciliation when somebody like Governor Northam can say he faced the storm and decided that he was going to turn it around and do something about it.”In an interview with the Guardian on Friday, Northam acknowledged the blackface incident had been a watershed moment.“That was a difficult time for Virginia and I’m thankful that Virginians stuck with me,” he said. “We had worked on a lot of equity issues prior to February 2019 but it really allowed me to travel around: I had listening tours and meetings and I learned so much from various people across Virginia.“The more I know, the more I can do, so we’ve really been able to put a stronger focus on equity and I made it clear to our administration, to our cabinet secretaries, that whether it be agriculture or education or health or whatever, we would address the inequities that continue to exist in our society today.”Then, in 2020, came the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and a nationwide uprising against racial injustice.“That was an awakening for a lot of people that look like me that hadn’t really ever thought through it in such detail,” Northam said. “So I kind of had a head start before that tragedy but I think it was an awakening. People said this just this is not right and we need to make changes.”Northam grew up in a conservative rural area and was in sixth grade when his school became racially integrated. When he got involved in politics, around 2006-07, he recalls, Virginia was still a red state but turning purple. The “blue wave” truly began with resistance to Trump’s election in November 2016, which prompted Northam to run for governor.“It’s diversity that really makes this country and, in our case, makes Virginia who we are,” he said. “We’re becoming more diverse every day and so we need to have our lights on and our doors open and make people feel welcome.In the smaller cities and in the country, it is quite conservative“We’ve really used that theme to support our base and also to draw more people to our party and supporting common sense policies. If you compare where we are today versus back in 2016, 2017, we’re essentially a blue state now.”‘Representation matters’Northam will soon return to work as a doctor, since state rules prevent him seeking a second consecutive term. Among the Democrats vying to succeed him in November are Terry McAuliffe, governor from 2014 to 2018, and two African American women: Jennifer Carroll Foy and Jennifer McClellan. Victory for either would be another historic breakthrough.Carroll Foy, 39, who became a member of the Virginia house of delegates in 2017, said: “I can’t speak about what happened in the past but what I can say is I know the man today, and the Ralph Northam today will go down as one of the most progressive governors that Virginia has ever had, delivering on the promises of getting us to expand Medicaid to 500,000 Virginians and helping to reform our criminal justice system.“I passed a bill to prohibit the use of chokeholds by law enforcement officers. We have just done such incredible things. I carried legalisation of marijuana for several years and now it’s passed in Virginia and that is under Governor Northam leading the charge and taking seriously his commitment to racial reconciliation.”Carroll Foy was one of the first African American women to graduate from Virginia Military Institute and is aware what message electing a woman of colour as Northam’s successor would send. “It is absolutely imperative for us to make good on what we’ve been saying,” she said. “Representation matters and for millions of little girls it’s hard to be what you can’t see. We are yet to have a Black woman lead this nation and we’re yet to have a Black woman lead in a state in this country and, while people have applauded Black women for delivering the White House and helping us win Congress, it’s not enough to thank us.“You also have to support us when we’re ready to lead, and we are ready. Now is our time. You don’t just need bills and pledges for Black women; we need them written by Black women. And I’m excited that as the next governor, I will be able to continue on the legacy that Governor Northam has started in addressing the inequities throughout all of our systems so we can ensure that Virginia’s future is better than its past.”John Edwin Mason, who moved to the state in the mid-1990s and teaches history at the University of Virginia, said: “It is a remarkable change. If you had told me that Virginia was going to legalise marijuana and outlaw the death penalty, I would have been very surprised in 1995 and probably would have told you that you had been drinking a little too much to think that that would be possible.“It was not simply a largely Republican state when it came to electoral politics, but it felt very conservative and it doesn’t quite feel that way on the whole now, although of course in the smaller cities and in the country, it is quite conservative.”Mason noted that Virginia Republicans seem to be embracing Trumpism, even after the state comprehensively rejected the president in 2020. Democrats hope other southern states will do likewise.Mason added: “I think that if you are an optimistic Democratic political operative, you’re probably saying that Virginia is the harbinger of things to come.“You would point to Georgia which just elected two Democratic senators in a very similar dynamic to the way that our two Democratic senators and Democratic governor have been elected in a state that is very split along regional lines. It is a big change and, of the states of the old confederacy, Virginia is by far the bluest.” More

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      Virginia may be first in south to abolish death penalty and abandon ‘legalized lynching’

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      Earl Washington came within nine days of being put to death by the state of Virginia. The date was set, the arrangements finalized. He would be taken to the death chamber, strapped into an electric chair, then jolted with 2,200 volts that would have paralysed his brain, stopped his heart and cooked his internal organs until his legs blistered and steam rose from his rigid and lifeless body.That was in 1985. Days before the execution Washington, a black man with severe learning difficulties who could barely read or write and had been assessed as having the developmental age of a 10-year-old, had a lucky break. He was contacted by a fellow death row inmate versed in the law who heard his story, sounded the alarm, and had the electrocution delayed.A feature of Washington’s disability was that he would defer to authority figures, readily agreeing to anything they said. In 1983, when he was picked up by police for an alleged burglary and quizzed about four other unsolved local crimes, he confessed to all of them.Three of the four crimes had to be dismissed because his account was so glaringly at odds with the evidence. But the fourth one stuck: the rape and murder of a woman the previous year.Here, too, Washington’s “confession” was profoundly suspect. It was concocted from his “yes” answers to detectives’ leading questions. When his account conflicted with forensic details, they corrected him.He said that his victim was a black woman, to which the interrogating officer replied, “Well that’s wrong, Earl, she was white.” Washington dutifully complied. “Oh, she was white,” he concurred.DNA testing eventually proved that Washington had nothing to do with the murder. In 2001 – 16 years after he came within days of execution – he was set free, an innocent man.Earl Washington is the only death row inmate in Virginia to have officially been exonerated. But the likelihood is that scores of other innocent black men were put to death by the commonwealth in the course of its grizzly 413-year history of capital punishment.This week, Virginia has the chance to make amends for what it did to Washington and to the hundreds of other African Americans it put on death row on the flimsiest of evidence. On Tuesday, the Virginia senate is expected to vote to abolish the death penalty, and by the end of the week the house of delegates is set to follow suit with its companion bill 2263.It would be hard to overstate the significance of this week’s votes. Were Virginia to end its four-century association with capital punishment, it would become the 23rd state in the union to do so.From the first execution in what is now the US, carried out in the Jamestown colony in 1608, until its most recent judicial killing in 2017, Virginia has taken the lives of more prisoners than any other state. Some 1,390 men and women have gone to their deaths.By far the largest racial group of the inmates who have been killed is African American. Which is no coincidence. The most significant aspect of abolition in Virginia, should it go ahead, is that it would be the first southern state from the old Confederacy to wean itself off a habit that was rooted in slavery and racial lynching.“This would be earth-moving,” said Dale Brumfield, a historian of capital punishment who acts as field director for Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (VADP). “To have killed more people than any other state, and then say we’re not doing this any more – it doesn’t get more remarkable.”Local abolitionists hope that, should the bill pass, Virginia’s example could have a domino effect throughout the south. Former Confederate states still account for 80% of all present-day executions.For LaKeisha Cook, a Baptist minister who has been holding prayer vigils for an end to the death penalty through the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy, repeal would be a fitting culmination to last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests. “This would make a profound statement that Virginia does indeed value black lives,” she said. “That we are acknowledging our ugly history of racism and taking steps to heal.”The abolitionist cause still faces a nail-biting vote in the House, with observers expecting a very slender majority for repeal in the 100-member chamber. Democrats, who took full control in Virginia last year for the first time in a generation, will side overwhelmingly in favor.But fewer than a handful of Republicans are expected to cross the aisle. Their opposition to abolition has stiffened in the wake of Donald Trump’s recent splurge of federal executions in which 13 prisoners were killed in quick succession, including Cory Johnson from Virginia.Despite last-minute jitters, hopes are riding high that the bill will pass. If it does, abolition would all but be assured as Governor Ralph Northam has come out strongly in favor of reform and has vowed to sign it into law, probably in April.“I firmly believe that 2021 will be the year that we eliminate the death penalty in Virginia,” Mike Mullin, the Democratic delegate who introduced House Bill 2263, told the Guardian.Mullin comes from an unusual background for an abolitionist – until he joined the general assembly five years ago, he spent his entire career as a criminal prosecutor. “I’ve handled many murder cases including one death case, and since a very young age I’ve always thought capital punishment amoral,” he said.One of his motivating principles, Mullin said, was that “justice isn’t vengeance”. Innocence also preyed on his mind, with 4% of all capital prosecutions estimated to end in wrongful convictions. “When people are executed you never have the opportunity to go back and take another look.”Arguably the most powerful argument for overturning capital punishment in Virginia relates to its long history of state-sanctioned racial terror. The theme resonates even in the location of the abolition vote at the Virginia state capitol in Richmond – during the civil war the exact same spot served as the capitol of the Confederacy.“Virginia has a very dark past that it has walked for the better part of 400 years,” Mullin said. “We have a lot to make up for from our history, and it’s high time we made a start.”The statistics tell the story. From 1800 to 1920, Virginia executed 625 black and 58 white people.Such an astonishing disparity was not accidental, it was baked into the judicial system. For hundreds of years, the death sentence was a form of punishment reserved almost exclusively for African American males.Under slavery, legislation allowed black Virginians to be put on death row for any offense for which a white man might receive a prison sentence of three years or longer. In 1894, a new law made attempted rape specifically of a white woman by a black man punishable by death.Lawmakers justified the move by saying that unless the commonwealth acted to protect its white women, white men would “take matters into their own hands” and turn to lynching.The 1894 law is clear-cut confirmation that the death penalty in the US was umbilically tied to lynching. In the words of Bryan Stevenson, the leading capital defense lawyer and racial justice campaigner, death row was the “stepson of lynching”.In Virginia, the connection was direct and unashamed. “Rocket dockets” were introduced that allowed black suspects to be arrested, tried and sentenced to death in a matter of hours. “Capital punishment in Virginia, by the way it was applied, was a legalized form of lynching,” Brumfield said.Take the case of Clifton Breckenridge. The 20-year-old black man was arrested in 1909 for the attempted assault of a white girl. That same day a grand jury returned an indictment within 45 minutes, the trial lasted one hour, and the all-white jury deliberated for 12 minutes before sentencing him to death.Breckenridge was executed 31 days later.Winston Green, who like Earl Washington had learning disabilities, was the second person to be killed in the electric chair after its introduction in 1908. He was executed for the crime at age 12 of “scaring a white girl”, whom he did not even touch.Perhaps the most notorious example was that of the Martinsville Seven. In 1951, seven black men were convicted of raping or aiding and abetting the rape of a white woman. The guilty verdicts were achieved with no forensic evidence against the men, who were each forced to make confessions in the absence of a lawyer.Four of the seven were executed in a single day. Then the electric chair was allowed to cool off for a day, before the remaining three were executed.When Brumfield investigated the case of the Martinsville Seven, he found that in the same year three white men had been convicted of raping black women. None of the perpetrators went to prison – one of the white men was found guilty of raping a “feeble-minded” black woman and fined $20.There are many other cases in similar vein, extending even into the modern era. From 1900 to 1969, Virginia put to death 68 men for rape or attempted rape and in all cases the perpetrators were black – no white man was ever executed in the commonwealth for rape.Today, shocking disparities live on. Murder of a white person in Virginia remains three times as likely to end on death row than murder of a black person.Two inmates are currently awaiting execution in the commonwealth: Anthony Juniper, 50, and Thomas Porter, 46. Both are African American. Both will have their lives spared if abolition goes through, though they will remain incarcerated on life sentences with no chance of parole.Advocates of holding on to the death penalty often cite the rights of victims and their families. Even here, though, there are powerful voices for change.Rachel Sutphin’s father, Cpl Eric Sutphin of the Montgomery county sheriff’s office, was taking part in a manhunt in 2006 when he was shot and killed by an escaped prisoner, William Morva. Rachel was nine years old when her father was murdered.In the run-up to Morva’s lethal injection in July 2017 – the last execution to have taken place in Virginia – she pleaded with the then Democratic governor, Terry McAuliffe, to spare the life of her father’s murderer. “I knew his execution wouldn’t bring me any solace or fulfillment. Now his death is just another date in the calendar that brings me great sadness.”Sutphin is hoping bill 2263 will pass. “In this world, in 2021, we should be beyond the point of killing people for killing people,” she said. “It’s so archaic.” More