News & Updates

Mike Farrell is an actor and a human rights and social justice advocate. He has traveled the country, speaking, writing and lobbying against the death penalty for over three decades and has been president of the board of directors of Death Penalty Focus for over 20 years.

Sarah Sanger is an associate attorney with Sanger Swysen & Dunkle in Santa Barbara. She works on criminal defense matters in both the state and federal courts primarily involving capital cases. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law where she did graduate work in philosophy while obtaining her law degree. She clerked for the Office of the State Public Defender in Oakland, working on capital cases, and for the Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office.

Linda Fox has been an advocate of death penalty abolition for more than three decades. Now retired, she is a former Research Librarian at the California Appellate Project, where she aided in post-conviction appeals for people on death row. In addition to her work with DPF, Linda also organizes around a number of cases of people in prison for crimes they did not commit.

Robert M. Myers grew up in Northern Orange County when there were more orange trees than people. He graduated from Cal State Fullerton in 1972 and Loyola Law School in 1975. He wrote Santa Monica’s rent control law as staff attorney with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles and served as Santa Monica City Attorney from 1981-1992. He is a founding board member of DPF and currently represents two men on California’s death row.

Born and raised in Bogue Chitto, Mississippi, Lawanda moved to California and became an Investigator with the Santa Barbara County Public Defender’s Office. She was the first African American woman in California to earn the title of Chief Investigator, and she served in this role from 1995 until she retired in 2016. She is a founding member of the Defense Investigator Training Accreditation Academy, currently serves on the Executive Board of the Democratic Club of Santa Maria Valley, and is the President the Santa Maria/Lompoc National Association of Colored People, among many other affiliations.

Garland Allen is the former Chicago Market Leader of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP’s state and local tax consulting practice and before that was a tax partner in the Chicago law firm of Hopkins & Sutter (now Foley & Lardner).

Esther Remigio is a staff attorney at the Children’s Law Center in Monterey Park. She represents children in the foster care system in Los Angeles

Reiss Clauson-Wolf is a writer/producer from Philadelphia. He attended Germantown Friends School, and thus spent his formative years being schooled in the Quaker tradition of practiced nonviolence. He has written for CBS, MRC, and Hulu, among others.

Over a ten year career at the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, Emily Caesar has managed large scale program and policy development, implementation, and evaluation projects centered on a variety of issues including obesity prevention, cannabis regulation, oil and gas policy, and substance use treatment and prevention. Since 2014, Emily has volunteered as a core leader with Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, Southern California, working alongside other leaders and coalition partners to transform the criminal legal system at the state and local levels. Emily holds a BA in Psychology from UC Berkeley and a dual Master’s in Social Work and Public Health from Washington University in St. Louis.

Sherry Frumkin has been combining her passion for art and social justice for nearly three decades. She has been Director of Santa Monica Art Studios and Arena1 Gallery since 2005, and between 1990 and 2010 she directed her own art gallery, hosting events and exhibitions benefiting organizations working to oppose the death penalty, protect the environment, end homelessness, support reproductive freedom, Native American rights, and other social justice causes. She is a decades-long board member of the Southern California ACLU Foundation and serves on the Center for the Study of Political Graphics. She has lived in California since 1975 and is honored to have been a recipient, along with her husband Leo, of Death Penalty Focus’s 2010 Rose Elizabeth Bird Commitment to Justice Award.

Mark Kimber is the past-President of the Salinas Steinbeck Rotary Club, the founder of a travel agency in Salinas, a volunteer with the Marine Mammal Center, and a certified skydiving instructor.

Takehiko (Take) Kawame is one of Japan’s leading death penalty attorneys and represents a client on Japan’s death row pro bono. He is a member of the Death Penalty Abolition Committee and the Legal Counseling Committee of the Japan Federation of Bar Association. Take is very active in organizing symposia, writing op-eds, and researching the capital punishment systems in Japan and the United States. Take also founded an educational organization to hold public meetings, converse with correctional officers about regulations, and arrange international conventions for volunteers who help prisoners with information and visitations. He studied at Sophia University in Japan and was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley in 2016.