- Saturday, February 3, 2001

Even Staunch Conservatives Rethink Executions

By Marc Fisher
RICHMOND

Frank Hargrove Sr. doesn't want anyone to think he has turned into a pacifist. He wants liberals to know that, with 19 years in Virginia's House of Delegates under his belt, he remains a true, firm conservative.  "They think they've got themselves a new boy, and they're trying to get me in on all sorts of screwball stuff -- gun controls and those sorts of things," says Hargrove, a Republican from Hanover County in the Richmond suburbs.  Sure enough, we're walking through the back halls of the General Assembly building, and a nice woman who works on aging issues rushes over to shake Hargrove's hand. "I'm so proud of you," she says. "So proud."  Hargrove graciously accepts the accolades, just as he good-humoredly notes that some of his longtime GOP colleagues "think I've got the plague."  What Hargrove has had is a dramatic change of heart about the death penalty. At 74, slightly stooped and hard of hearing but sharp as a tack, Hargrove has written a bill to abolish capital punishment in Virginia. Which is especially striking given that, back in 1982, Hargrove proposed that the state adopt public hangings.  "I thought, and I still do, that if you're going to execute, the public should be aware of it and shouldn't be spared the gory details," he says. "But I have become convinced that for a civilized society, life without parole meets our responsibility to keep law and order. The chance of making a mistake with the death penalty is very real.  "I may have gained more courage," Hargrove says when I ask him to explain his journey to a distant shore. "You're not going to heaven because you were in the dang legislature. But if you do the right thing . . . "  A House committee this week unanimously killed Hargrove's proposal and rejected a moratorium on executions. But death penalty reforms are getting a more serious hearing than in previous years. Some credit goes to October's pardon of Earl Washington Jr., who spent nearly 10 years on death row before DNA evidence cast doubt on his conviction. Some legislators fear that an innocent person might be executed.  But some credit also goes to Hargrove, who has shown that a hard-core conservative can go soft on the death penalty and suffer no voter rebellion. (Hargrove has angered some supporters, but most of his mail has been respectful.)  A longtime senator, H. Russell Potts Jr. (R-Winchester), told me that he still believes strongly in the death penalty, but that some of his colleagues are taken with Hargrove's example.  "As you get older, you don't see things so black and white anymore," says Potts, who surprised some senators the other day with a moving speech in which he described his late mother's hearing problems and argued that the state should require some health benefits to include coverage for hearing aids. "That wasn't the kind of thing I'd normally support, but like they say, all politics is local -- and personal. And I can just hear my mother up there saying, 'Russell, you're gonna do this, you hear?' You get older, you see things a little differently."  Virginia, while second to Texas in the number of criminals it has killed since the death penalty returned in 1976, is the per capita execution champion among large states.  "No system is perfect and this one isn't," says House Speaker S. Vance Wilkins Jr. (R-Amherst), who favors executions. He suspects that death penalty opponents are trying to win "by wearing it out" -- repeal by a hundred tiny reforms. Yet Wilkins supports bills to ease access to DNA testing and relax the 21-day rule, which excludes new evidence offered more than three weeks after a conviction.  Possibly nothing will pass this year. But both sides agree something has changed.  "The day I put my bill in, I felt better," Hargrove says. "Because, well, maybe I'd been something of a coward."  As Hargrove walks toward the Capitol, Sen. Janet D. Howell (D-Fairfax) hurries to catch him: "You know, I think I may be joining your cause." Howell has been a death penalty supporter, but Hargrove has her thinking harder. "We almost executed an innocent man," she says. "A lot of us are wrestling with the death penalty. I'm wondering if we can ever make it fair enough."