Race & the Death Penalty Seminar, Sept. 10th
Electric Chair at Sing Sing. George Eastman House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
A seminar on Race and the Death Penalty will be presented online by Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, on Friday, September 10, at 7 pm EDT.
Throughout our nation’s history of racial injustice – from slavery to lynchings to systemic racism – white lives have been valued over black and brown lives. The death penalty, with its brutal record of racial injustice, is inextricably linked to this history. The same criminal justice system that perpetuates mass incarceration determines who lives and who dies by execution. Join us for a discussion about the role of race in the capital punishment system, from our earliest days as a nation through today.
Registration for this seminar is free.
Registrants will receive the zoom login the day of the event.
Our Panelists & Moderator
Ngozi Ndulue is the Senior Director of Research and Special Projects at the Death Penalty Information Center. Ngozi’s legal career has focused on the intersection of racial justice and the criminal legal system.
After receiving her J.D. from Yale Law School and clerking at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, she represented death-sentenced clients as an Assistant Federal Public Defender in the Arizona Capital Habeas Unit. She continued this work at the Ohio Justice & Policy Center (OJPC) in Cincinnati, where she also engaged in policy research, coalition building, and advocacy on state and local criminal justice issues. From 2016 to 2018, Ngozi served as Senior Director of Criminal Justice Programs at the national NAACP, providing training, strategic direction, and research to advance the NAACP’s criminal justice agenda.
Ngozi’s current work focuses on deepening the public’s understanding of the origins, functioning, and impact of the death penalty. At the Death Penalty Information Center, Ngozi conducts original research, supervises data collection and analysis, and leads strategic planning initiatives. Ngozi is the lead author of DPIC’s September 2020 report, Enduring Injustice: The Persistence of Racial Discrimination in the U.S. Death Penalty.
Frank R. Baumgartner holds the Richard J. Richardson Distinguished Professorship in Political Science at UNC-Chapel Hill. His research includes significant work in the area of capital punishment, including such issues as trends over time, public opinion, geographic patterns, innocence, and other matters. He is the co-author of The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence (2008) and of Deadly Justice: A Statistical Portrait of the Death Penalty (2018).
Herman Lindsey was wrongfully convicted and sent to Florida’s Death Row in 2006. In 2009 he was exonerated by a unanimous verdict of the Florida Supreme Court. and became the 135th person to be exonerated from death row in the U.S., and the 23rd person to be exonerated from Florida’s Death Row. He is the Board Secretary of Witness to Innocence, on the Board of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty and is an Ambassador for Represent Justice. He hosts the online show “Cruel Justice” and speaks across the U.S. and internationally.
Our Moderator, Mark Elliott, is Executive Director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (FADP), a Florida-based, state-wide organization of individuals and groups working together to end the death penalty in Florida. FADP’s network includes dozens of state and local groups and thousands of individual Floridians, including murder victims’ family members and other survivors of violent crime, law enforcement professionals, families of the incarcerated, and death row exonerees. Florida currently has more than 300 people on death row. FADP campaigns to halt executions and reduce new death sentences by highlighting the death penalty’s problems, including racial bias, wrongful convictions, executions of the seriously mentally ill, and failure to serve the critical needs of victims’ families.
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