VIRGINIA — President Joe Biden has granted executive clemency to nearly all of the country’s death row inmates, a move affecting 37 individuals. Of those, at least four have ties to Virginia, specifically to the Hampton Roads region.
The inmates with Virginia connections include Jorge Avila Torrez from Arlington, James Roan Jr. and Richard Tipton from Richmond, and David Anthony Runyan from Newport News.
Watch previous coverage: Biden grants executive clemency to most death row inmates
According to the Virginia Pilot, Runyan was convicted in 2009 for the murder-for-hire of U.S. Navy officer Cory Allen Voss. Voss was shot and killed outside a Langley Federal Credit Union on Jefferson Avenue in the Oyster Point area of Newport News in 2007. At the time of his death, Voss was stationed at Norfolk Naval Station.
Runyan’s trial, conducted in the U.S. District Court in Norfolk, was notably the last federal death penalty case in the Hampton Roads area.
Biden’s decision reduces the sentences of these inmates to life in prison without the possibility of parole and provides them immunity from President-elect Donald Trump’s promise to resume federal executions. Currently, three inmates remain on death row.
These three individuals include the perpetrator of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the gunman responsible for the killing of nine people at a historically Black church in South Carolina in 2015, and the individual who killed 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018.
