Editorial Board, The News Leader

Personally opposed to the death penalty but bound by law to uphold it, Gov. Terry McAuliffe, D, may have backed into a way to end state executions.

Early this week, McAuliffe rejected a General Assembly bill putting the electric chair back in use, even if a condemned inmate requests the lethal injection method. Many European firms have refused to sell the drugs needed for lethal injection, resulting in a shortage.

McAuliffe says the electric chair is inhumane and instead recommends that the Department of Corrections be allowed to obtain the drugs from hidden contractors and then pharmacies compounding the drugs also be kept secret.

In theory, the secrecy would exist to protect the contractors and pharmacies from civil lawsuits.

In reality, states who have enacted such laws — including Arkansas, Ohio and Missouri — are facing legal challenges. Secret government contractors? What a bad idea for everyone except lawyers hired to preserve government transparency, already in short supply in Virginia.

McAuliffe says if legislators don’t agree to this change when they reconvene April 20, executions will effectively end in Virginia. They have already slowed. Since the death penalty regained national use in the 1970s, Virginia has executed 110 people, but only three in the past four years, with only seven men waiting on death row.

Even if legislators agree to McAuliffe’s secrecy, the certain legal challenges will curtail what few executions are on the horizon.

We want Virginia to end the death penalty altogether.

The public — including pro-life, small-government conservatives — has come to increasing understanding that death penalty doesn’t save money or reduce crime. Even worse, as part of a flawed justice system, it can result in the execution of an innocent person. Just last week Virginia released Keith Allen Harward from prison, after he spent three decades locked up for a crime he did not commit.

Given the choice between life without parole and the death penalty, a clear majority of surveyed Virginians choose imprisonment over execution.

We are puzzled when McAuliffe or anyone says the electric chair is barbaric, but lethal injections are not. No matter the method, the death penalty reduces us all and is a surrender to our baser instincts of vengeance. We’re a better state than that. Aren’t we?

Forget arguments about electric chairs and lethal injections. For the sake of public safety and human dignity, the only answer to the vilest of crimes is life without parole.

Virginia should abolish the death penalty. Nebraska did so last year. We can think of much better use of Virginia’s limited resources.

Our View represents the majority opinion of the newspaper’s editorial board, Roger Watson, president; David Fritz, executive editor; and Deona Landes Houff, community conversations editor.