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.
Sherry Frumkin has been combining her passion for art and social justice for nearly three decades.
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.
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.
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).
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.
One hundred-ninety-seven individuals sentenced to die have been exonerated in the U.S. since 1973. Melissa Lucio, on Texas death row since 2008 for a crime no reasonable person ever believed she committed, could and should be the 198th. Lucio, now 55, was arrested in 2007 for the murder of her two-year-old daughter, Mariah, despite forensic and eyewitness evidence that her daughter died from a head injury she suffered in a
CA Gov. Gavin Newsom grants 37 pardons; 18 commutations Late last month, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced he pardoned 37 individuals and commuted the sentences of 18 others because “clemency [is] an important part of the criminal justice system that can incentivize accountability and rehabilitation, increase public safety by removing counterproductive barriers to successful reentry, correct unjust results in the legal system, and address the health needs of incarcerated people
“In states where the death penalty does exist, it shouldn’t be cruel, it shouldn’t be unusual (and) it definitely shouldn’t be experimental, like nitrogen hypoxia is,” Alabama State Rep. Neil Rafferty stated when he introduced HB 248, which would prevent the state from executing any more people using nitrogen gas, the Alabama Reflector reports. In January, the state killed Kenneth Smith using nitrogen gas, the first time a state has
Fifty-four-year-old Daniel Gwynn was freed from Pennsylvania’s death row on February 29, the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office announced. He served nearly 30 years for a crime he didn’t commit. Gwynn was convicted of the 1994 arson murder of Marsha Smith based on false witness identification, Gwynn’s false confession, and withheld evidence. Police testified that witnesses identified Gwynn in a photo lineup, but the photos were never turned over to
Last Wednesday, the Oklahoma House Criminal Justice and Corrections Committee cleared House Bill 3138, the Death Penalty Moratorium Act, making it eligible to be heard on the House floor, Oklahoma Watch reports. The bill was introduced by Republican Rep. Kevin McDugle, who, although a death penalty supporter, has been troubled by several cases in which individuals were sentenced to death, most prominently Richard Glossip’s. “We cannot trust the system, period,
In this powerful and poignant update, Sister Helen Prejean, fueled by her outrage at the barbarism of capital punishment and her unwavering commitment to its abolition, shares the final, tragic moments of Ivan’s life through a lens filled with both tender compassion and fervent resolve. This is Sister Prejean’s firsthand account, deeply personal yet universally resonant, urging us to see beyond the immediate tragedy to the larger call to action
Idaho corrections officials attempted to kill 73-year-old Thomas Creech today, but after an hour of repeated attempts to find a vein for its lethal injection drugs, they called it off. It was the state’s first execution attempt since 2012. “We are angered but not surprised that the State of Idaho botched the execution,” Creech’s lawyers said in a statement after the attempt, according to the New York Times. “This is
Please join Sister Helen Prejean, DPF President Mike Farrell, and TCADP in urging Collin County DA Greg Willis, Gov. Greg Abbott, and the Texas Ct of Criminal Appeals not to kill Ivan Cantu this Wednesday, February 28. [Unfortunately, his execution was carried out.] Ivan was convicted of the 2001 killing of his cousin, James Mosqueda, and Mosqueda’s fiancée, Amy Kitchen. But there is so much wrong with the case against
Robert Badinter, the former French Minister of Justice and the man who, in 1981, in one of his first acts as justice minister in the government of President François Mitterrand, wrote the law that abolished capital punishment in France, died early on Friday. He was 95. At a commemoration ceremony on the 40th anniversary of that historic achievement last September, with French President Macron at his side, Badinter declared, “I
