While the coalition is grateful to the Virginia General Assembly for unanimously passing this legislation, we believe that the bills, as passed by the legislature, remain flawed and will be, potentially, ineffective in accomplishing the goal of real transparency.

The DOJ report released Wednesday after two years of review confirms and validates our concerns to a greater degree than we could have imagined, and we are convinced that the systemic problems and harms being experienced there are worse still than we know.

Today, the ACLU of Virginia sent a letter to Governor of Virginia Ralph Northam urging him to act with dispatch to ensure that Virginia’s protocols for administering the death penalty exemplify the highest standards of transparency and accountability.

The report calls for solitary confinement to be banned in state prisons except “only in rare and exceptional cases, for the shortest duration, with the least restrictive setting necessary and only when the prisoner poses a credible continuing and serious threat to the security others."

The organizations listed below support an increase in Virginia’s felony larceny threshold but oppose the so-called bipartisan compromise that traded an increase in the threshold for passage of legislation enhancing the enforcement of restitution orders entered in criminal cases.