RICHMOND — Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam on Tuesday issued rare posthumous pardons to a group of Black men known as the Martinsville Seven, who were executed in 1951 after being convicted by all-White juries of raping a White woman.

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       Northam (D) met Tuesday morning with family members of the men to hear their pleas and surprised them by announcing that he already had decided to act.

       The relatives broke into applause, and several covered their faces and sobbed. “Seventy years. Seventy years!” exclaimed Pamela Hairston, who has spent nearly three decades writing letters to draw attention to the case.

       Northam issued “simple pardons,” which do not deal with the issue of guilt or innocence but recognize that the cases involved racial inequity and a lack of due process, his office said.

       Virginia governor asked to grant posthumous pardons to seven Black men executed for 1949 rape

       With that, Northam has issued more than 600 pardons since taking office in January 2018 — more than the total granted by the previous nine Virginia governors combined, according to his office.

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       The effort to clear a huge backlog of pardon requests is “part of Virginia being a state that rights wrongs,” Northam said in a brief interview. “We have 402 years of history and a lot of wrongs that we need to right.”

       The Martinsville case became a civil rights flash point shortly after the men were arrested in January 1949.

       That month, a 32-year-old White woman was walking past a group of Black men drinking by the railroad tracks in the Southside Virginia town when, she said, one of them tackled her. Over a span of about two hours, the woman testified at trial, several of the men raped her repeatedly, threatening to kill her if she screamed and dragging her into the woods after she briefly escaped.

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       Police quickly rounded up seven Black men and produced signed confessions. Although all seven were said to have admitted having sex or attempting to have sex with the woman, their descriptions of events differed, and all pleaded not guilty to having sex by force.

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       Several of the men were illiterate and could not read their own confessions, and none had a lawyer present when they signed. They were convicted in just eight days by all-White juries and put to death in the electric chair in February 1951.

       The case prompted protests at the White House and highlighted a vast inequity in Virginia’s criminal justice system: Between 1908 and 1951, 45 men were executed for rape and all were Black.

       Years later, in 1977, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that imposing the death penalty in cases of rape amounted to cruel and unusual punishment under the Constitution.

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       Late last year, relatives and descendants of the executed men petitioned Northam to issue a posthumous pardon, at least the second time they had requested he do so. The families did not argue that the men were innocent but rather that they did not receive impartial justice.

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       “The Martinsville Seven were not given adequate due process,” the petition said. “They were sentenced to death for a crime that a white person would not have been executed for .？.？. and they were killed, by the Commonwealth, ‘simply for being black.’？”

       There was some question as to whether the state law allowed for pardons to be issued posthumously, but A.E. Dick Howard, a law professor at the University of Virginia who oversaw the writing of the Constitution adopted by the state in 1971, said that it gives the governor that power.

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       Northam has used the pardon more than any other governor of the modern era, according to state officials. In July, for instance, he granted an absolute pardon to Bobbie Morman Jr., who served 22 years in prison for his part in a Norfolk shooting in which no one was injured. Earlier in August, he exonerated Emerson Eugene Stephens, a waterman from Reedville who spent 32 years behind bars for a murder he didn’t commit.

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       Earlier this year, Northam signed legislation making Virginia the first state of the former Confederacy to abolish the death penalty.

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