In the early 1920s, DeJarnette, began lobbying intensively for the Commonwealth of Virginia to pass a compulsory sterilization law. He became so frustrated with his opponents in the Virginia assembly that he said "When they voted against it, I really felt they ought to have been sterilized as unfit." When E. Lee Trinkle, a longtime political colleague of Strode and supporter of the eugenics movement, was elected Governor of Virginia in 1922, DeJarnette achieved an influential political supporter for his campaign. In order for the bill to pass the legislature, the men focused on changing public sentiment by broadening the public’s knowledge of eugenic science and the laws of hereditary defect. Governor Trinkle released a report on the critical financial condition of the Commonwealth. Within the report, Trinkle reported that one of the largest contributions to Virginia’s dire financial state was the increased spending on institutionalizing what he called "defectives". Trinkle advocated the compulsory sterilization law as a cost-saving strategy for public institutions that had experienced growth in the incarceration of what he referred to as feeble-minded and defective populations. Trinkle added that legalizing sterilization for the insane, epileptic, and feeble-minded persons would allow these patients to leave the institutions and not propagate their own kind. Virginia's “Eugenical Sterilization Act,” was signed into law by Trinkle on March 20, 1924. DeJarnette testified against Carrie Buck as an expert witness in the important eugenics case "Buck v. Bell", in which the United States Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of Virginia's eugenics law, in a case that has been questioned since but never expressly overruled.