Supreme Decisions—Re-Thinking the Death Penalty

Director of the Southern Center for Human Rights
Panelist

Stephen B. Bright has been the director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, a public interest legal project, since 1982. Prior to joining the center, he was a legal services attorney with the Appalachian Research and Defense Fund, which provides assistance to poor people in eastern Kentucky; a trial attorney with the public defender service of the District of Columbia; and director of the District of Columbia Law Students in Court program, a trial practice clinic operated by a consortium of the laws schools at American, Catholic, George Washington, Georgetown, and Howard universities.

In addition to his work at the center, Bright teaches courses on the death penalty and criminal law at the Harvard and Yale law schools. For more than two decades, he has represented persons facing the death penalty at trial, on appeals, and in post-conviction proceedings.

Bright's work and that of center have been featured in two books, Proximity to Death by William McFeely (W.W. Norton, 1999) and Finding Life on Death Row by Katya Lezin (Northeastern University Press, 1999). He received the American Bar Association's Thurgood Marshall Award in 1998; the roger Baldwin Medal of Liberty presented in 1991 by the American Civil Liberties Union; the Kutak-Dodds Prize, presented in 1992 by the National Legal Aid & Defender Association; and numerous other awards.

Executive Director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty
Panelist

Steven W. Hawkins is the executive director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. Prior to this position, he served as an associate counsel with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

An advocate for civil and human rights, Hawkins has represented persons under death sentence in state, federal, and military courts across the country. He has provided commentary on the death penalty on The Today Show, CNN, Court TV, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and other major television news programs.

Hawkins was recently selected as a Next Generation Leadership Fellow by the Rockefeller Foundation, and he received the Thurgood Marshall Award from the Bar Association of New York for his advocacy on behalf of persons under sentence of death. His profession affiliations include the National Conference of Black Lawyers and the Center for International Studies at New York University, where he serves on the board of trustees.

Panelist

Jane Henderson is an anti-death penalty and human rights activist. Since 1988, she has served as co-director of the Quixote Center, a multi-issue, faith-based, social justice organization.

In 1990, Henderson founded the center's Equal Justice USA project. That project's Moratorium Now! campaign works at the grassroots level to spark public scrutiny and protest of racial, economic, and political biases that pervade the death penalty in the United States.

Henderson's articles have appeared in scores of publications, including the Philadelphia Tribune and the Washington Post. She has also authored numerous reports, including Philadelphia's Judge Sabo: the Judge Who Became Death Row's King and Equal Justice Under Law?: Racism and the Death Penalty.

Vice President and Director of U.S. Programs for the Open Society Institute
Moderator

Gara LaMarche is vice president and director of U.S. Programs for the Open Society Institute, a foundation established by philanthropist George Soros to promote open societies around the world.

Before joining OSI in 1996, LaMarche served as associate director of Human Rights Watch and was director of its Free Expression Project (1990-1996) and the Freedom-To-Write Program of the PEN American Center (1988-1990). From 1976 to 1988, he served in a variety of positions with the American Civil Liberties Union, including associate director of its New York branch (1979-1984) and executive director of the Texas Civil Liberties Union (1984-1988). In 1988-1989, he was a Charles H. Revson Fellow on the Future of the City of New York.

LaMarche is the author of more than 75 articles on civil liberties and human rights topics and has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, the Nation, and the Texas Observer. He is the editor of Speech and Equality: Do We Really Have to Choose? (New York University Press, 1996), and serves on the boards of Article 19 and the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, and on the U.S. advisory committee for Index on Censorship, the London-based human rights magazine, and the advisory committee for the Human Rights Watch Women's Rights Project.

Panelist

Kristen Wolf is currently a consultant with The Justice Project, a criminal justice reform organization that conceived and is promoting the Innocence Protection Act—federal legislation that would improve death penalty representation and ensure universal access to DNA testing.

Wolf is also in the process of launching her own communications firm, Spitfire Strategies. She previously served as a vice president of Fenton Communications.