Advocating an End to the Death Penalty
Resource type: News
Stanford Social Innovation Review | [ View Original Source (opens in new window) ]
The Atlantic Philanthropies and its network of partners are using advocacy and communications to end capital punishment in the United States once and for all.
By Annmarie Benedict & Eric Brown
The use of the death penalty in the United States is arguably one of the country’s most controversial political issues. The United States stands practically alone among democracies that use capital punishment. From 2007-2012, it trailed only China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq in the number of its citizens that it put to death.
In 2006, as follow-up to its previous work to abolish the death penalty for juveniles, The Atlantic Philanthropies joined with a number of other funders and grantees, and developed a comprehensive strategy to abolish the death penalty completely. Effective advocacy communications anchored the strategy, and the work appears to be paying off. A recent independent evaluation by researchers Michael Quinn Patton and Kay Sherwood found that the campaign contributed to the momentum toward abolition.
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is senior program executive and director of grants monitoring at The Atlantic Philanthropies, where she has focused on criminal justice, immigration, civil liberties, and race. Previously, Benedict worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLC and was a visiting lecturer at Middlebury College.
Eric Brown is the principal of Brownbridge Strategies, a strategy and communications consulting firm in San Francisco. Prior to that, for almost 11 years, he was the communications director for the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in Menlo Park, California.