Starting next July, Virginia will transfer sentencing power from juries to judges—a move that means it will join 48 other states and halt a practice that advocates say had driven mass incarceration, led to longer sentences, and discouraged people from exercising their right to a jury trial.

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam signed the jury sentencing reform bill in a virtual ceremony on Thursday. It was approved by the state legislature in late October.

For more than two centuries, Virginians accused of crimes who chose to proceed with a jury trial have been sentenced by a jury, not judges. Juries in Virginia are not provided with sentencing guidelines, and unlike judges, they do not have the power to suspend mandatory minimums. This meant that when people in Virginia went to jury trials, they often ended up with longer sentences. In many cases, the fear of jury sentencing leads people to enter plea agreements with prosecutors, and gives those prosecutors the leverage to send them to prison for longer.

Bradley Haywood, the Chief Public Defender for Arlington County and founder of the progressive advocacy group Justice Forward Virginia, said during the virtual bill signing that only 1.2% of felony sentencings in Virginia in 2019 were from jury trials because so many people took pleas.

“So when we talk about the jury penalty…and the effects it has, it really did basically make the right to a trial by jury a myth in Virginia,” said Haywood. “The phenomenon that was produced by this really was one of the main drivers of mass incarceration.”

Once the bill goes into effect in July of next year, Kentucky will be the only state in the U.S. that still does jury sentencing this way.

Virginia State Sen. Joe Morrissey (D-Richmond), who introduced the jury sentencing reform bill, called it “one of the most impactful and transformational pieces of legislation that we’ve done.”

A few minutes after it passed, Morrissey said he called his wife on the phone and “told her, ‘I might be in the Senate for the next 20 years or not, but I don’t think I’ll pass more impactful legislation than this piece of legislation.”

The bill did not pass the legislature without a political fight. The bill’s opponents argued it would be too costly for the state: If more cases went to trial, that meant spending more money on the public defenders, judges, clerks, prosecutors, and jurors required to staff those cases. In the end, according to reporting from the Washington Post, the bill passed after Northam made a last-minute phone call to the House Appropriations chairman to announce that he had found $6 million to finance the legislative change.

A coalition of prosecutors in Virginia who consider themselves progressive also supported the legislation.

“The average Virginian…would be surprised and probably upset if they understood just how unfair in practice our jury system had been,” said Ramin Fatehi, Deputy Commonwealth’s Attorney for Norfolk, at the virtual signing. “We as progressive prosecutors felt that this bill was worth fighting for, worth breaking with a host of other prosecutors for, and drawing a lot of fire for, because it was the right thing to do.”

Democrats in Virginia put particular emphasis on criminal justice reform during this year’s special legislative session. The state budget passed in early October funded several significant reforms to policing, including a ban on no-knock search warrants, a ban on most chokeholds, and new powers for the attorney general to investigate police misconduct.

Da’Quan Love, Executive Director of the Virginia NAACP, applauded the jury sentencing reform bill and said he hoped the push for changes to the criminal justice system would continue next year.

“We know that this is just one of many steps that we here in the Commonwealth need to take to ensure that we have a most just and equitable commonwealth for every Virginian,” Love said.

While he agreed the jury sentencing reform bill was perhaps the most significant change to Virginia’s criminal justice system in 50 years, Haywood emphasized that the state still has a long way to go.

“What we’ve done here is we’ve joined 48 other states,” said Haywood. “So this is progress. I wouldn’t say it’s progressive. This is us getting out of the Ice Age and basically into the Stone Age … there’s so much more to be done with criminal justice reform in Virginia.”