Lawmakers in Virginia passed a bill Tuesday that would end the death penalty — a historic and long-awaited move that makes the Commonwealth the first southern state to ban capital punishment.

The state Senate passed a House version of the bill with a 22-16 vote and the House a Senate version of the bill 57-43. Both bills will now go to Gov. Ralph Northam, who is expected to sign it. Only one version of the bill needs to be passed for the measure to become law.

The House version of the bill would abolish the death penalty for people currently under a death sentence and includes the option of sentencing people to life without parole for serious offenses.

“Over Virginia’s long history, this Commonwealth has executed more people than any other state. And, like many other states, Virginia has come too close to executing an innocent person. It’s time we stop this machinery of death,” wrote Northam, House Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn, and Senate Majority Leader Dick Saslaw in a joint statement.

Though Virginia hasn’t issued the death penalty since 2011 and has not executed someone since 2017, the commonwealth has executed at least 1,398 people since 1608 — more than any other state. It is set to become the 23rd state to abolish the death penalty.

Other jurisdictions in the region have made similar moves to abolish the death penalty. The Supreme Court nullified capital punishment for states across the country in 1972. Some jurisdictions opted to reintroduce the measure, but the District was not one of them (the D.C. Council repealed the measure in 1981). Prior to that, the Council passed a bill that allowed a life sentence without parole for people found guilty of first-degree murder.

In Maryland, capital punishment was abolished in 2013.

Support for the death penalty has waned in the last few decades. A Gallup poll conducted last fall found that 55% of respondents across the country said they were in favor of the death penalty — the lowest figure since 1972.

“Virginia is joining 22 other states in abolishing the death penalty, after centuries of the immoral practice being unjustly applied to people of color, and sometimes, the innocent,” said Vice Caucus Chair Scott Surovell (D-Springfield), who introduced the Senate version of the bill, in a press release. “As the patron of the bill this year and in years past, it’s been a long battle to get this far – but a worthwhile one, to see the Commonwealth now take steps forward after years of falling backward.”

Michael Stone, executive director of Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, says lawmakers and the public have become especially worried about the possibility of sentencing an innocent person to death alongside a large number of exonerations for violent crimes. Between 1900 and 1977, Virginia executed 73 Black defendants for convictions of crimes — including rape and armed robbery — that did not result in death, while no white defendants were executed for those offenses, per the Death Penalty Information Center. Since 1976, when the state reinstated the death penalty, more than 50 Black people out of 111 have been executed.

“I think the public came to view the death penalty as too risky … and I believe that politicians in both parties were very concerned about the possibility of executing an innocent person,” he tells DCist/WAMU.

There are a few reasons the measure passed this year. Stone says with Democrats in control of both chambers, a shift in public perception of capital punishment, and the wave of activism following the murder of George Floyd, the bill passed much quicker than anticipated.

Stone adds that keeping the death penalty adds a financial burden to states. Since the Supreme Court did away with capital punishment, the process has been stymied in additional hearings and court procedures that take time, money, and move prosecutors and state attorneys away from other cases.

Now that Virginia has passed the measure, Stone says he anticipates other states will follow suit, especially southern jurisdictions like Kentucky and Tennessee.

“In the next five years, I think you’re going to see two, three, as many as five or six states ending the practice, he says. “And we think I think that more than one of them will be in the south.”