the highest priorities during Northam's tenure in office for Virginia's criminal justice reform advocates, who noted that jury sentences are usually much longer than sentences determined by judges and that consequently, before jury sentencing was made optional in Virginia, defendants in the state often took plea deals to avoid jury sentences. Another bill signed by Northam during the 2020 special legislative session clarifies that prosecutors in Virginia are allowed to dismiss charges against defendants. This had previously been ambiguous under state law. Death penalty Ralph Northam opposes the death penalty. On March 24, 2021, he signed a law abolishing the death penalty in Virginia. Writs of actual innocence Another reform enacted by Northam in 2020 eases the petition process for writs of actual innocence. Through this process, which Virginia established in 2004, newly available evidence is examined, and if found exonerating by a court, the petitioner's criminal record is expunged. In its original form, this process was available almost exclusively to petitioners who had pleaded not guilty at trial; among those who had pleaded guilty, the process could be used only by a petitioner who had received a death sentence or whose conviction permitted a life sentence. Prior to the reform enacted under Northam, any failed petition that had been based on nonbiological evidence could not be followed by a new petition also based on nonbiological evidence, and any successful petition had to be found by a court to contain "clear and convincing evidence" that the petitioner had been wrongfully convicted. Under legislation signed by Northam, anyone is allowed to petition for a writ of actual innocence, regardless of how the petitioner pleaded at trial, petitioners are allowed to pursue writs of actual innocence any number of times through the presentation of new evidence that is either biological or nonbiological, and for any petition to succeed, it need only to be supported by "a preponderance of the evidence". By changing "clear and convincing evidence" to "a preponderance of the evidence", Virginia's standard for granting writs of actual innocence was lowered to conform with the standards employed by a majority of other states. An additional bill reforming the writs of actual innocence unanimously passed the state legislature in 2020 and was signed by Northam: it allows private laboratories to test DNA evidence when the Virginia Department of Forensic Science is unable to do so. Police reform In 2020, Northam signed the