Virginia next in line to abolish death penalty. What’s behind the shift?

Rachel Sutphin wasn’t thinking about the death penalty when her father, Montgomery County Sheriff’s Deputy Cpl. Eric Sutphin, was killed on duty in Blacksburg, Virginia, in 2006. She was only 9, after all. Nor did she really understand it two years later, when a jury sentenced her father’s killer, William Morva, to death.

But as Mr. Morva’s lawyers periodically appealed the verdict over the next decade, his impending death became a recurring source of anxiety in Ms. Sutphin’s life. By the time she was in high school, Ms. Sutphin had...