John D. Carlson is associate professor of religious studies at Arizona State University. His books include, as co-editor, Religion and the Death Penalty: A Call for Reckoning. His work focuses on religion, ethics and politics.

Ted A. Smith is associate professor of preaching and ethics at Emory University in Atlanta. Smith focuses on questions of ethics and justice, such as the death penalty, in a democratic society where the majority may support ethically problematic measures.

Sister Helen Prejean is a Roman Catholic nun and author of Dead Man Walking, an account of her ministry with death row inmates in Louisiana’s Angola State Prison that was turned into an Oscar-winning film in 1996. Her most recent book is The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions. Prejean, whose office is in New Orleans, […]

Timothy J. Floyd is director of the Law & Public Service Program at Mercer University School of Law in Macon, Ga. He is an expert on the death penalty and served as defense counsel in the first case in the nation under the Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994. His primary research interest is legal ethics, […]

People of Faith Against the Death Penalty is a nonprofit, interfaith organization based in North Carolina whose mission is to educate and mobilize faith communities, particularly in the South, to act to abolish the death penalty in the United States.

David Masci is a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project in Washington, D.C. Masci previously worked for 14 years as a journalist for Congressional Quarterly.

James S. Liebman is Simon H. Rifkind Professor of Law at Columbia Law School in New York. He specializes in criminal law, ethics and capital punishment.

Joseph Bottum is an author based in South Dakota and a former editor of the conservative-leaning interfaith journal First Things. Contact through Random House publicist Katie Moore.

Robert Blecker is a professor at New York Law School and an expert on capital punishment.