Virginia Campaign Coordinator & Publications Manager
Michael Stone joined the staff of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty in 2011. He has twenty-nine years of experience working with the faith community, government and community organizations on a wide range of social justice issues. He is working to build relationships between the faith community and conservatives with the abolition movement in Virginia. In addition, he edits the NCADP Lifelines newsletter and manages other NCADP publications.
Prior to joining NCADP, Stone served as the Director of the Office of Justice & Peace for the Catholic Diocese of Richmond. In that role he supervised a staff of ten people across southern Virginia working on migrant ministry, Haiti twinning, prison ministry, ecological justice, family life, disabilities ministry, and socially responsible investment. He has worked on public policy issues as diverse as abortion, affordable housing, assisted suicide, capital punishment, globalization, immigration reform, minimum wage, and stem cell research.
Stone has served as a board member for the Virginia Catholic Conference, the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy, and the Richmond Peace Education Center. He earned Bachelor of Science degrees in Economics and Urban Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an M.A. degree in Pastoral Ministry from Boston College.
For decades most death penalty states used a three-drug lethal injection protocol until the U.S. manufacturer of sodium thiopental stopped supplying it. The other producers of the drug were all in Europe where capital punishment is illegal. Under pressure from its own citizens, these companies have worked to keep their products from being used in U.S. executions. As a result, state administrators of capital punishment have gotten increasingly frustrated and desperate in their actions to gain access to drugs for executions. Read More
In his book Exile and Embrace: Contemporary Religious Discourse on the Death Penalty, Anthony Santoro presents a thorough intellectual review of religious debates on the death penalty. He examines this debate in different contexts – doctrinal statements, congregational study discussions, political campaign rhetoric, and the writings of and interviews with death row chaplains. Read More
Earlier this week the prominent Catholic theologian and social activist, Fr. Bryan Massingale, wrote a provocative blog post on the U.S. Catholic web site about the Trayvon Martin case, commenting that when we accept profiling as reasonable, then Trayvon Martin becomes, “a sacrifice at the alter of white fear.” Read More
In 2009 North Carolina blazed a trail by becoming the first state to pass a Racial Justice Act in response to evidence of bias in death penalty cases, including jurors admitting racial bigotry and the exonerations of three African-American death row inmates in the preceding three years. The intent of the law was ensure that, if North Carolina is to have a death penalty, every effort is made to ensure that racial bias plays no role in that system. Read More
For Mark Elliott, Executive Director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (FADP), it was the killing of a Jewish prisoner by the state that put him on the road to abolish capital punishment. Read More
In an interview published earlier this year by the evangelical magazine, Sojourners, Richard Viguerie explains how his political conservative philosophy and Christian faith inform his opposition to capital punishment. Read More
The Catholic Mobilizing Network to End Use of the Death Penalty (CMN) has done a great service by creating this two page resource for the faith community. Read More
In 2006, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a dissenting opinion that there was not “a single case, not one, in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit.” This assertion outraged many in the death penalty abolition movement whose experience told them otherwise. Read More
St. Louis University Professor Tobias Winright uses a literary vignette from The Lord of the Rings as a jumping off point for a powerful reflection on Christian faith and the death penalty in his article, “Gandalf, Gollum, and the Death Penalty,” published in the January 2013 edition of Sojourners Magazine. Read More
In 1976 the Supreme Court upheld one of the country’s most controversial practices — capital punishment. Since then, over 1,300 Americans have been executed by the state. Read More
