State Sen. Scott Surovell ’96 Shepherded Legislation Ending Institution in Virginia By Mike Fox AS A RECENT COLLEGE GRADUATE working in Virginia Gov. L.
Douglas Wilder’s administration, Scott Surovell toured the state’s new correctional facility in Jarratt, including the execution chamber and its electric chair, which had been added from another prison. “It is pretty disgusting,” he recalled about the prison tour, “and so to be around a chair that a couple hundred men got electrocuted in was not a pleasant experience. So that kind of did it for me.” Nearly 30 years later, Surovell, a 1996 graduate of the Law School, sponsored legislation as a state senator that ended capital punishment in Virginia. The commonwealth of Virginia has executed more people than any other U.S. state over four centuries, and is second only to Texas nationwide in executions since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, with 113. In one of the country’s landmark death penalty cases that may have marked a turning point, the justices ruled in a Virginia case 38
UVA LAW Y ER | Spring 2021
in 2002 that executing convicts with intellectual disabilities violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Thanks to Surovell’s efforts, effective July 1, Virginia will be the first state in the former Confederacy to abolish the death penalty. Surovell was first elected to the House of Delegates in 2009 and has served in the state Senate since 2016, representing Fairfax, Prince William and Stafford counties. He is a founding member of Surovell Isaacs & Levy in Fairfax, where he focuses on traffic defense, consumer law, personal injury, family law and appeals. His father, Robert J. Surovell ’69, is also a member of the firm. Surovell has never represented a murder suspect or witnessed an execution—“I can’t imagine going to watch”—nor has he ever represented capital defendants. Public opinion nationally and statewide has shifted against capital punishment, he explained, and the Virginia Capital
AP PHOTO/STEVE HELBER
The Death of Capital Punishment
