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

    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

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    Statue of civil rights pioneer Barbara Johns replaces Lee at US Capitol

    A statue of the civil rights activist Barbara Johns, who played a key role in the desegregation of the public school system, will be installed in the US Capitol, officials said on Monday, replacing one of Robert E Lee, a leader of the pro-slavery Confederacy.Johns was 16 when she led classmates at her all-black Virginia high school in protest of substandard conditions, leading to a lawsuit that was resolved in the US supreme court’s 1954 Brown v Board of Education decision, which declared segregation illegal. The statue, provided by Virginia, will replace one of Lee, a Confederate general during the civil war who owned slaves himself.“The Congress will continue our work to rid the Capitol of homages to hate, as we fight to end the scourge of racism in our country,” the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said in a statement. “There is no room for celebrating the bigotry of the Confederacy in the Capitol or any other place of honor in our country.”Representative Donald McEachin of Virginia said on Twitter: “I look forward to seeing a statue of Barbara Johns, whose bravery changed our nation, representing Virginia here soon.”Virginia’s governor, Ralph Northam, said workers removed the statue from the National Statuary Hall Collection early on Monday morning. Northam, a Democrat, requested the removal. A state commission decided Lee was not a fitting symbol of Virginia and recommended a statue of Johns.Lee’s statue had stood with one of George Washington since 1909 as Virginia’s representatives in the Capitol space. Every state gets two statues.Washington commanded American forces in the revolutionary war and became the first president. Like other Virginian founders and presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe, he owned enslaved people.John Adams of Massachusetts, the second president, did not. He is not represented in the National Statuary Hall collection.Confederate monuments have re-emerged as a national flashpoint since the death of George Floyd, a Black man who was killed when a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck in May this year. Protesters decrying racism targeted Confederate monuments in multiple cities, and some have been taken down.“The Confederacy is a symbol of Virginia’s racist and divisive history, and it is past time we tell our story with images of perseverance, diversity and inclusion,” Northam said.“I look forward to seeing a trailblazing young woman of color represent Virginia in the US Capitol, where visitors will learn about Barbara Johns’ contributions to America and be empowered to create positive change in their communities just like she did.”The presence of statues of generals and other figures of the Confederacy in Capitol locations such as Statuary Hall, the original House chamber, has been offensive to African American lawmakers for many years. Former representative Jesse Jackson Jr, an Illinois Democrat, was known to give tours pointing out the numerous statues.But it is up to the states to determine which of their historical figures to display. Jefferson Davis, a former US senator from Mississippi who was president of the Confederacy, is still represented. So is the Confederate vice-president, Alexander Stephens, from Georgia.A statue of Andrew Jackson, the seventh president, who enslaved people, represents Tennessee. More

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    Terry McAuliffe Faces All-Black Democratic Primary in Virginia Governor’s Race

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTerry McAuliffe Faces All-Black Democratic Primary in Virginia Governor’s RaceMr. McAuliffe, who was governor from 2014 to 2018, says he wants to take “Virginia to the next level and to lift up all Virginians.”Terry McAuliffe at a campaign rally for Joseph R. Biden Jr. in Norfolk, Va., in March.Credit…Samuel Corum/EPA, via ShutterstockDec. 9, 2020, 12:57 p.m. ETTerry McAuliffe, the former governor of Virginia, on Wednesday entered the contest for his old job, simultaneously offering himself as both a trusted steward during an economic and public health crisis and someone prepared to fight against “the old way of doing things.”“I am running for governor again to think big and to be bold and to take the Commonwealth of Virginia to the next level and to lift up all Virginians,” Mr. McAuliffe said in a brief speech outside a public school in Richmond, the state capital.Mr. McAuliffe, 63, formally began his campaign surrounded by four senior elected officials, all of whom are Black. The setup was a nod both to the relationships he nurtured during his governorship from 2014 to 2018 and the complex nature of the state’s 2021 primary, in which three Black candidates have already announced their candidacies for the Democratic nomination.Mr. McAuliffe’s 2021 campaign has for months been an open secret in Virginia — at a March campaign rally, Joseph R. Biden Jr. called him “the once and future governor” — and Mr. McAuliffe’s allies have made the case that his coalition would look a lot like Mr. Biden’s, with core support from Black voters and suburbanites who sent Mr. Biden to the White House.“We need him to lift the Black community from the crippling pandemic, because he knows that it has hit the Black communities, Black communities and brown communities harder than anyone else,” L. Louise Lucas, the Virginia State Senate president, said while introducing Mr. McAuliffe on Wednesday. “We need his experience and tested leadership, tested leadership, tested leadership.”Virginia’s contest for governor will serve as a first test of the post-Trump Democratic coalition. For four years, culminating with the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, the party’s voters prioritized electability, choosing more moderate candidates who faced liberal firebrands in nearly all competitive races.Mr. McAuliffe is the fourth Democrat to enter the 2021 race for governor, joining three Black candidates who have been campaigning for months: Jennifer McClellan, a state senator; Jennifer Carroll Foy, who on Tuesday resigned her seat in the House of Delegates to campaign for governor full time; and Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax.But unlike in the presidential contest, in which Mr. Biden sold his electability against President Trump, whichever Democrat emerges from Virginia’s June primary will be a heavy favorite against the Republican challenger.Virginia has become increasingly Democratic since 2009, the last time Republicans won a statewide office. The party won control of the state legislature in 2019, and Mr. Biden carried the state by 10 percentage points last month.The Republican field already appears fractured, with Amanda Chase, a Republican state senator who models herself after Mr. Trump, announcing last weekend that she would run as an independent candidate rather than seek the Republican Party’s nomination at a state convention next year. Kirk Cox, a former speaker of the House of Delegates, is seeking the Republican nomination and Pete Snyder, a wealthy marketing executive, may also join the G.O.P. primary race soon.At the same time some Virginia liberals have pronounced themselves eager to elect Ms. McClellan or Ms. Carroll Foy, either of whom would be the nation’s first Black woman governor. Virginia has never elected a woman to be governor and has not elected a woman to statewide office since 1989.Ms. Carroll Foy, at 39 the youngest candidate in the field, was not shy about attacking Mr. McAuliffe as a creature of the past.“Career politicians like Terry McAuliffe are interested in maintaining the status quo,” she said in a statement Tuesday night. “But Virginians are calling for change. They want someone who understands their problems as I do because I’ve lived them. While I respect Terry McAuliffe’s service, he doesn’t understand the problems Virginians face. A former political party boss and multimillionaire, Terry McAuliffe is simply out of touch with everyday Virginians.”Ms. McClellan, while not attacking Mr. McAuliffe directly, cited her own “life experience” as evidence she would be the best governor in the field in a statement released Wednesday.Mr. McAuliffe said Wednesday that he would center his campaign on helping the state’s economy recover from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, pledging Virginia’s largest investment in public education and appealing to Black voters in the Democratic primary in June.Mr. McAuliffe campaigned alongside former President Bill Clinton in Charlottesville, Va., in 2013.Credit…Khue Bui for The New York TimesHe also leaned heavily on his past tenure as governor, citing fights with Republicans who at the time controlled Virginia’s General Assembly. In the same breath, Mr. McAuliffe promoted his record as governor and called for a new approach to running the state government.“The old Richmond approach just doesn’t work anymore,” he said. “Folks, it is time for a new Virginia way. I know that old way of thinking because I fought against it constantly as governor, time and time again.”Mr. McAuliffe is a longtime fixture in Democratic politics, both nationally and in Virginia. He is close enough to former President Bill Clinton that the two men speak daily, and he claims to make more than 100 phone calls every day. A former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Mr. McAuliffe has run for Virginia governor twice, losing a bitter 2009 primary before winning in 2013. He also weighed a 2020 presidential campaign but bowed out in April 2019 once it became clear that Mr. Biden would seek the Democratic Party’s nomination.He spent the rest of 2019 campaigning and fund-raising for Democrats running for Virginia state legislative seats, helping the party seize control of both the State Senate and House of Delegates for the first time in a generation.Virginia’s current governor, Ralph Northam, a Democrat, is forbidden by state law from seeking a second consecutive term. Mr. McAuliffe is vying to be the second Virginia governor since the Civil War to be elected twice, following Mills Godwin Jr., who was elected as a Democrat in 1965 and as a Republican in 1973.Virginia’s contests for governor, coming the year after presidential elections, have for decades been considered an opportunity for the party that just lost the White House to take control of a large state government. Mr. McAuliffe’s 2013 victory over the Republican Ken Cuccinelli is the only time since Mr. Godwin’s 1973 election that the party that held the presidency also won the Virginia governor’s mansion.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Which party will hold the keys to states’ legislative and congressional maps?

    While the race for the White House is sorted out across tight midwestern battlegrounds, Republicans can already claim an important victory further down the ballot. The GOP held state House and Senate chambers across Texas, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Kansas, and many other key states. This ensures a dramatic edge when it comes to redrawing new state legislative and congressional maps next year, following the completion of the census count.
    This year, Democrats had hoped to avenge the GOP’s 2010 Redmap strategy, which drove Republicans that year to control swing-state legislatures in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Florida, and majorities they have not relinquished since. That also allowed Republicans to draw, on their own, nearly five times as many congressional districts nationwide as Democrats.
    Tuesday’s election offered both parties the last chance to gain influence over maps that will define the state of play for the next decade. States have different rules on this: almost three-quarters of all states, however, give their legislatures the prominent role. That heightens the stakes of state legislative races in years ending in zero. On Tuesday, in the two states with the most at stake – Texas and North Carolina – Democrats fell far short, despite millions of dollars invested by the national party and outside organizations.
    In Texas, Democrats needed to gain nine seats in the state House to affect redistricting. They may not net any. Republicans picked up several open seats, and GOP incumbents held on in almost all the battleground districts enveloping the cities of Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston. In House district 134, which includes part of Houston, Democrat Ann Johnson ousted GOP incumbent Sarah Davis. But otherwise, the party ran far behind expectations.
    The consequences could linger until 2031, if not longer. Texas Republicans may look to redraw state maps next year based on the “citizen voting-age population” or CVAP, and depart from the longtime standard of counting the total population. A 2015 study by Thomas Hofeller, the late GOP redistricting maestro, found that such a switch “would be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites,” and create a relative population decline in Democratic strongholds in south Texas and in otherwise fast-growing parts of Dallas and Houston.
    In North Carolina, meanwhile, even a new, fairer state legislative map – albeit one that still slightly favored Republicans – couldn’t help Democrats break the GOP’s 10-year hold on both the House and Senate. Democrats netted one Senate seat – they needed five – and lost ground in the state House. Republicans will not only have a free hand to draw maps next year, but they also appear to have gained seats on the state supreme court – which will adjudicate any dispute over these maps – and cut the Democratic majority there to 4-3. (Democrats did make gains on both the Ohio and Michigan state supreme courts, both of which could be asked to weigh in on the constitutionality of maps later this decade.)
    As a result, Republicans will have a free hand in drawing new districts across both states, providing the GOP with a renewed decade-long edge and also paving the way for conservative legislation on voting rights, health care, reproductive rights, education funding and much more. Any new voting restrictions, meanwhile, could assist Republicans in maintaining electoral college dominance in these states, as well.
    Democrats in Kansas had hoped to simply break GOP supermajorities and sustain a Democratic governor’s veto power over a GOP gerrymander that could devour the state’s one blue congressional seat. But they appear to have been unable to muster either a one-seat gain in the House or the three seats necessary in the Senate.
    Wisconsin Democrats, however, did successfully preserve the veto of Democratic governor Tony Evers, ensuring that the party will have some say over maps that have provided Republicans with decade-long majorities even when Democratic candidates won hundreds of thousands more statewide votes. Wisconsin was one of the most gerrymandered states in the country after the Republican takeover in 2010.
    Democrats flipped the Oregon secretary of state’s office as well, which plays a determinative role in redistricting should Republicans deny Democrats a quorum to pass a map. The party also denied Republicans in Nebraska’s ostensibly nonpartisan unicameral chamber a supermajority that would allow them to gerrymander the second congressional district in Omaha, which carries an electoral college vote.
    There was mixed news for gerrymandering reformers in two states where fair maps were on the ballot statewide. In Virginia, voters overwhelmingly approved a redistricting commission that will consist equally of lawmakers and citizens to draw lines next year. But in Missouri, by a narrow margin of 51% to 49%, voters repealed a 2018 initiative that would have placed maps under the control of a neutral state demographer. That will leave Republicans in full control of the process.
    After 2010, Pennsylvania has elected a Democratic governor, and Michigan has adopted an independent commission, suggesting less partisan maps next year. But by holding Texas, North Carolina, Florida and Ohio, Republicans appear likely to draw at least four times as many congressional seats by themselves.
    That advantage, in turn, will endure long after whoever won Tuesday’s presidential election has left the scene. More

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    Trump and Biden head for Minnesota as early voting begins in three states

    Lines formed at polling stations in three states on Friday, 46 days out from 3 November, election day itself, as early voting began. Concern about ballot access under the pandemic has been widespread, particularly as Donald Trump continues to attack voting by mail with baseless claims of widespread fraud.In Minnesota, a state Hillary Clinton won by just 1.5 points in 2016 and which the Trump campaign is targeting, the president and Joe Biden were both on the campaign trail.In Virginia, the state’s two Democratic US senators were among early voters. At one site in Richmond, the state capital, dozens lined up before a polling station opened. CNN reported local officials as saying “they’ve never seen this many people show up on the first day”.Virginia was until recently a swing state but now leans firmly Democratic. Voting also began on Friday in South Dakota, which is solidly Republican.Trump has repeatedly said he wants to flip Minnesota in November, in hopes that it could offset losses elsewhere. He has visited regularly and has tailored policy moves to rural parts of the state, including reversing an Obama policy prohibiting the development of copper-nickel mining and bailing out soya bean, corn and other farmers hurt by Trump’s trade clashes with China.More recently, Trump has embraced a “law and order” message aimed at white voters concerned by protests against racism and police brutality which have sometimes turned violent. Minnesota saw unrest after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May.However, polls indicate Biden has a significant edge in the state. According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll this week, Biden leads by 16 points among likely voters, 57% to 41%.On Friday, Trump was scheduled to speak in Bemidji while Biden traveled to Duluth for a tour of a union training center. Duluth mayor Emily Larson told the Associated Press: “One of the things the Trump campaign has been very good about is visibility in Duluth, but also in areas around Duluth.”In Michigan, meanwhile, a judge handed down a key ruling concerning mail-in voting, writing that the state must accept ballots postmarked the day before election day, 3 November, which arrive in the weeks following.The decision will probably result in thousands more voters having their ballots counted in a key battleground state.In 2016, Trump won Michigan by about 10,000 votes. One of the top reasons mail-in ballots are rejected is because they arrive past the deadline to be counted: 6,405 ballots were rejected for that reason in Michigan’s August primary. Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat who is the state’s top election official, called for extending the deadline.The Covid-19 pandemic, coupled with reports of mail delays, have made that deadline unrealistic, wrote Judge Cynthia Diane Stevens of the Michigan court of claims.“Some flexibility must be built into the deadline in order to account for the significant inability of mail to arrive on what would typically be a reliable, predictable schedule,” the judge wrote, ordering ballots counted as long as they are postmarked by 2 November and arrive within 14 days of election day.The ruling was the second in two days extending ballot deadlines in a key state. On Thursday, the Pennsylvania supreme court blocked the state from enforcing an election night deadline for absentee ballots, instead ordering it to count them as long as they are postmarked by election day and arrive by the following Friday.The Michigan ruling was in a suit filed by Priorities USA, a Democratic group. Michigan also restricts who can return an absentee ballot on behalf of a voter. Stevens, citing the pandemic, said the state could not enforce those restrictions from the Friday before election day through election night. More