The Killing Of Prisoner Richard Boggs By The Virginia Department Of Corrections Was Not A "Legal" Execution But Murder And There Isn't A Statute Of Limitations On Murder By William Thorpe

Left: The electric chair in the death chamber at Virginia State Penitentiary in 1991. Right: The computer that controlled the electric chair. The prison was closed and demolished in the early '90s.Library of Virginia

When The Commonwealth of Virginia indulged in Capital Punishment, till Democrats and a majority of Virginia voters abolished it in 2021.The legality of killing by Capital Punishment was Due Process of Law. Simply, the existence and compliance to specific steps, from the initial arrest or The State of Virginia placing its hands on the sovereign person or human being, in other words imposing its detaining will and intent on a Human and from that moment forward the terms of the interaction and relationship is defined by law. Whether the law is malevolent or benevolent is besides the point. The law is process which the State subjects and submits itself to and as such is indicted by or in perpetuity held to account by. When killing people under its capital punishment logic was The Commonwealth of Virginia's highest function and its most savage based on the historicity of savagery. It had its process and that process gave the killing of people by the State of Virginia legality or acceptance within The Social Contract, in contrast with murder. Which is killing without due process of law, nevertheless its logic and reason, it exist outside terms of Social Contract. In other words the singular logic and reason of the sovereign human is without standing of due process as due process of law is only to be found and realized as a communal or aggregate function of and within Social Contract, which necessitates it. So with all of this said, The Commonwealth of Virginia violated law when it killed Richard Boggs in 1990, because it violated the process of the act. By violating the process of the killing, the act then became as any other killing outside of Due Process of Law. The killing became "murder". On January 19, 2023, under title NPR uncovered secret execution tapes from Virginia. More remain hidden, reporter Chiara Eisner told us about the murder of prisoner Richard Boggs under guise of Capital Punishment by The Virginia Department of Corrections in 1990.Virginia's Due Process for the act of legal execution as Capital Punishment had its steps or process or to quote the French writer Jacques Delarue (in his book The Gestapo, commenting on Hitler and his henchmen) and I paraphrase, the banal administration of death, which Virginia prison officials tasked with killing Richards Boggs, violated without a second thought, hence revealing law as an inconvenience. Virginia's capital punishment law and process that transformed murder into legal execution required prison officials in process of executing a prisoner to have and maintain contact with The Governor of Virginia. Because the Governor had authority to put on hold or call off an execution. But as Chiara Eisner's reporting on Virginia's execution tapes reveal, the killing of Richard Boggs in 1990 happened without such contact and authority. Meaning prison officials who were killing Richard Boggs were acting outside of Virginia law and its capital punishment process, as such it was murder and The Virginia Department of Corrections must be held accountable.

By William Thorpe

I'm William Thorpe Virginia exiled me to the Texas prison system. I'm solitary confined at the Wainwright Unit