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.

Read a series of exchanges from October 2011 at The Public Discourse, a politically conservative site, between Christopher O. Tollefsen and Edward Feser, arguing over whether capital punishment is morally wrong or justifiable in some cases.

Read a roundup of the positions of various religious groups and denominations on capital punishment, posted by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Read a July 11, 2013, news article about the possibility of death sentence for a man who kidnapped and held three women captive in his Ohio home.

Read a July 9, 2013, opinion piece by professor of theology Robert Olson arguing that churches should do more to oppose capital punishment.

Sandy Dwayne Martin is a religion professor at the University of Georgia in Athens. He has written about women’s roles in African-American denominations.

Teresa Fry Brown is an associate professor at Emory University in Atlanta. She is author of Weary Throats and New Songs: Black Women Proclaiming God’s Word and God Don’t Like Ugly: African American Women Handing on Spiritual Values.

The Sept. 21, 2011, execution of Troy Davis drew international condemnation because of questions about the case, and it sparked a national debate. Read a Sept. 11, 2001, article published on ABCNews.com about the execution.

In September 2011, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia told an audience at Duquesne University Law School, “If I thought that Catholic doctrine held the death penalty to be immoral, I would resign.” That statement prompted criticism that Scalia, one of six Catholics on the high court, was misinterpreting Catholic teaching against capital punishment. Read this Sept. 25, […]