James J. Megivern is an emeritus professor of religion at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. He is an expert on Christian ethics and capital punishment and is author of The Death Penalty: An Historical and Theological Survey.

Herbert H. Haines is a sociology professor at the State University of New York, College at Cortland. He studies social movements for criminal justice reform and is the author of Against Capital Punishment: The Anti-Death Penalty Movement in America, 1972-1994.

Davison Douglas is a law professor at the College of William & Mary’s Marshall-Wythe School of Law. He is an expert in constitutional law, civil rights law and the relationship between law and religion.

Harold W. Attridge is Sterling Professor of Divinity at Yale University Divinity School. He is the author of The Bible and the Death Penalty.

James E. Coleman Jr. is a law professor at Duke University in Durham, N.C. He chaired the American Bar Association’s Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project from 2001-06.

Justice For All is a victims’ rights and criminal justice organization that focuses on reducing and prosecuting homicide cases based in Houston. The organization maintains Pro-Death Penalty, a resource site that lists information about victims, and MurderVictims.com.

Read an essay about Islam and the death penalty written by Aslam Abdullah and posted by Beliefnet.com.

Read an April 1, 2004, essay published on the Orthodox Union’s website about the split opinion on the death penalty in the Jewish community.

Pew held a January 2002 conference on the death penalty that included reflections from a variety of faith traditions. The essays were collected into a volume, Religion and the Death Penalty: A Call for Reckoning. The volume has the writings of 21 contributors representing a range of religious traditions.