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.

John C. McAdams is a political scientist at Marquette University in Milwaukee whose research focuses on congressional politics, social class and elections and capital punishment. He has written that he favors capital punishment, even if it doesn’t work as a deterrent.

Joseph L. Hoffmann is Harry Pratter Professor of Law at Indiana University-Bloomington. He is an expert on the death penalty and federal criminal law.

Dudley Sharp of Houston is a death penalty activist who formerly opposed capital punishment but now supports it. He has been interviewed on major television and radio news and opinion programs and included in newspaper articles.

Jim Marcus is co-director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Capital Punishment Clinic. The clinic gives students the opportunity to help represent indigent criminal defendants in capital cases.

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, […]

Joanna Shepherd is a law professor at Emory University in Atlanta.

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, […]