The following 100 men in the pdfs below have been executed since the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the death penalty to be resumed in 1976. They are listed in order of the date of execution. Virginia is scheduled to perform its 101st execution Thursday.

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The victims were male and female, young and old, police officers, the defenseless, the innocent and the not-so-innocent.

They were killed during robberies, rapes, traffic stops and a deadly extremist attack outside CIA headquarters. The weapons included firearms of every stripe, a rock, a plastic bag, a garden tool, a baseball bat and a brick.

Robert Stacy Yarbrough used a pocketknife to nearly behead a bound 77-year-old man. He was put to death last month in Virginia's 100th execution since the death penalty was allowed to resume in 1976, a toll that trails only Texas' 406.

"It really is rather sobering to find Virginia second only to Texas. . . . I really am struck by that," said A.E. Dick Howard, a professor of law and public affairs at the University of Virginia.

Howard was the executive director of the commission that wrote Virginia's current constitution. "As one who was born and raised in Virginia and spent a lot of time working with the governor's office and the legislature . . . you don't think of it as a state of extremes."

"We somehow think of ourselves as steering a middle course," he added. "I would have expected several other states to be ahead of us."

The odds of being executed in Virginia once sentenced to death are second to no state. As of the end of 2005, 65 percent of the 145 killers sentenced to death in Virginia had been executed. In Texas, the figure is 36 percent.

Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, and many others consider Virginia to be a leader in the modern era because it is one of the states with the lowest reversal rates in appeals courts for death-penalty cases.

"Over the past 30 years, hardly any death sentences were overturned by the Virginia Supreme Court or the 4th Circuit that governs Virginia cases in the federal courts," he said.

. . .

Critics say the appeals courts here fail to catch trial errors caught elsewhere and that the state did a poor job, particularly in the early years, of providing good lawyers to defendants in death-penalty cases.

Defenders of the death penalty say Virginia did a better job in redrafting its capital-punishment law and in trying death-penalty cases leading to fewer errors than in other states.

A study by Columbia Law School found that the higher a state's death-sentencing rate -- the number of death sentences per 1,000 murders -- the more errors and appeals court reversals occurred. Virginia's death-sentencing rate was one of the lowest in the country.

The study concluded that Virginia did a good job keeping political pressure off judges and had a strong record of catching and punishing serious criminals -- factors that tended to be lacking in states with high reversal rates.

Virginia has 17 inmates on death row, one of the smaller death rows in the country and a reason why Virginia may be overtaken by Oklahoma -- with 87 executions and more than 80 on death row -- as having the second-highest number of executions, behind Texas.

. . .

Dieter, whose group opposes capital punishment in its current form, contends that Virginia's death-penalty climate is changing.

"Death sentences, executions and the size of death row have all been declining in the state. In the last election, the people selected a governor who opposes the death penalty," he said. Dieter added that juries are finding sentencing killers to life without parole -- an option in Virginia since 1995 -- an acceptable alternative to death.

Howard said the reason Virginia ranks so high probably is due to a mix of factors. "It can't be because Virginia is a state where so many horrendous crimes are committed. . . . There must be something else going on."

"I would hope these figures would provoke some public debate," and not necessarily on the question of abolition, Howard said.

"I think there should be some very sober and somber discussion about just when and where the death penalty is justified. It's such an exceptional measure."
Contact Frank Green at (804) 649-6340 or fgreen@timesdispatch.com.