Richmond Times-Dispatch: “Four centuries of capital punishment in Virginia ended Wednesday outside the Greensville Correctional Center, the site of more than 100 of the state’s most recent executions.
Gov. Ralph Northam signed legislation abolishing the death penalty under a tent opposite the entrance to the sprawling prison. L Unit, home of the execution chamber where electrocutions and lethal injections were conducted, was hundreds of yards away and could not be seen from the event.
Northam was given a brief tour of the death house by corrections officials earlier Wednesday that made an impression.
“I don’t know how else to describe it, but only to say that it is a powerful thing, to stand in the room where people have been put to death. I know that experience will stay with me for the rest of my life and it reinforced me that signing this new law is the right thing to do. It is the moral thing to do,” Northam said.
“The death penalty is fundamentally flawed,” he said. “We know that the system doesn’t always get it right.””