People of Faith Against the Death Penalty – Opportunities

Mobilizing Throughout the Triangle

The great social issues the Triangle Community Foundation and its partners seek to address intersect perhaps nowhere else as they do at 1300 Western Blvd. in Raleigh — North Carolina's death row, which disproportionately houses the poor, minorities, and many who have been marginalized throughout their lives.

People of Faith Against the Death Penalty has been in the Triangle leading the effort to abolish the death penalty in North Carolina since the early 1990s. Founded in Raleigh by local clergy and lay people, PFADP has been unrelenting in our efforts to offer the Triangle community, North Carolina and our country a new vision of restorative justice and alternatives to the death penalty. Our mission is to educate and mobilize faith communities to act to abolish the death penalty in the United States… and we’re starting here at home.

The ability to kill its citizens is the greatest power citizens give to their government short of sending citizens to fight in war. It is critical that citizens be informed and engaged around the death penalty. People of Faith Against the Death Penalty provides this role for citizens in the Triangle and throughout the region and country. PFADP offers opportunities to attend educational events, receive informational literature, and be presented with opportunities for taking action and effecting change on this issue.

PFADP has held more than 250 community forums, generated more than 1,100 moratorium resolutions by congregations and organizations, including 39 by NC cities and counties, and more than 60,000 petition signatures. This effort led to the NC Senate becoming the first legislative body in the South to call for a moratorium. Since 2004 we have organized dozens of press conferences involving murder victims’ family members and religious and civic leaders. As an information clearinghouse to media and the public, PFADP handles 1,500 calls and emails per year. Our Web site has had more than 800,000 visitors.

We are winning!

We are building on our successes to continue to reduce the scope of the death penalty and help the public to understand the useless, expensive, error-prone and unfair policy that it is. We have new opportunities in a more favorable political climate. Triangle citizens will be elemental to building on these opportunities.

With your support we will help win more victories in narrowing the application of the death penalty in North Carolina. Using our well-developed set of strategies for grassroots mobilization, we empower thousands of citizens in the Triangle and beyond to act as agents of change in calling for a suspension of executions and for significant reforms to the death penalty system.

PFADP has led the grassroots effort in North Carolina to reexamine and limit the death penalty. Our work has helped to create an unprecedented atmosphere of doubt about the death penalty here, one where doctors have now restricted their profession's participation in executions — thereby creating a de facto moratorium on executions — and where legislators feel emboldened to offer more reforms of this policy than ever before. A record number and kind of model reforms have been proposed — and are moving — in the legislature. The death penalty is receding.

With your support we can help citizens of the Triangle to understand the issues surrounding the government's killing of prisoners in their names in the wee hours of the morning in downtown Raleigh.

We can help people understand the need for increased citizen involvement in and scrutiny of the administration of the death penalty.

With your help, we can help citizens of the Triangle to discuss and debate this public policy, and we present them with opportunities to act and help shape the state’s approach to violent crime.

With your help many more Triangle citizens will understand the immorality of the death penalty and the depth of the problems in its administration.

With your help thousands of citizens will take action to improve the North Carolina's criminal justice system.

Join us today!