West Virginia State University West Virginia State University West Virginia State University (WVSU) is an historically black public university founded in 1891 in Institute, West Virginia. In the Charleston-metro area, the school is usually referred to simply as "State" or "West Virginia State". It is one of the original group of African American land-grant colleges established by the second Morrill Act of 1890. African-American students currently are a minority of attending students. The University is a member-school of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund. The university's Gus R. Douglass Land-Grant Institute is divided into three programmatic divisions: WVSU Extension Service, WVSU Agricultural and Environmental Research
Capital punishment in West Virginia George Lecco and Valerie Friend, for the murder of a informant who was supplying federal law enforcement with information about the Leccos cocaine drug ring. Those verdicts and sentences were overturned in 2009 due to juror misconduct, and the retrials ended with life without parole and 35 years for Lecco and Friend respectively. Along with Iowa, West Virginia became the final pre-"Furman" state to abolish capital punishment in 1965. Capital punishment in West Virginia Capital punishment is abolished in the U.S. State of West Virginia since 1965. Prior to secession from the Confederacy and admission to the Union on June