Gov. Ralph Northam has signed a bill officially abolishing the death penalty in Virginia, making it the first southern state to end capital punishment and marking a dramatic change for the state that’s carried out the most executions in the country.

Northam signed the state Senate’s version of the bill, which passed last month, into law on Wednesday.

“Signing this law is the right thing to do — it is the moral thing to do — to end the death penalty in the commonwealth of Virginia,” Northam said during a press conference Wednesday.

Virginia has the most prolific history of executing people out of all states, totaling more than 1,300 executions committed to date, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. The last executions in Virginia took place in 2017, and there are currently two people on death row.

Northam said cases like Earl Washington Jr. — a Virginia man who was sentenced to death row and later exonerated when found not guilty — are proof the system doesn’t work and is not applied equally across the board.

“We know this commonwealth’s use of capital punishment has been inequitable,” Northam said.

The bill is an about-face for Virginia. Just last year, a bill that attempted to limit capital punishments for individuals with mental illnesses went nowhere in the General Assembly. But with bi-cameral Democratic control in the state legislature and a push for criminal justice reform following the murder of George Floyd last summer, the bill passed the General Assembly this year, 22-16 in the Senate, and 57-43 in the House.

In the lead-up to signing the bill, Northam cited racial discrimination tied to capital punishment.

“A person is more than three times as likely to be sentenced to death when the victim is white than when the victim is Black,” he said during his State of the Commonwealth Address in January.

Between 1900 and 1977, the state carried out executions of 77 Black defendants for convictions of crimes that did not result in death, while no white defendants were executed for the same offenses during that time, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Since 1976, more than 50 of the 111 people executed by the state were Black.

Virginia’s move to abolish the death penalty follows several other progressive policy measures aimed at reforming criminal justice from state lawmakers. In late February, the General Assembly passed a measure granting people the automatic right to appeal a trial judge’s decision in civil and criminal cases. Earlier this month, the Commonwealth restored voter rights to more than 70,000 people formerly incarcerated for felonies, as well as those currently serving time.

Virginia is now the 23rd state to ban the death penalty. The Supreme Court nullified capital punishment for states in 1972 — but some, like Virginia, opted to reintroduce the measure. D.C. repealed the measure in 1981, and Maryland abolished capital punishment in 2013.

“It’s important we change the systems in which inequality festers,” Northam said.