Community news items related to capital punishment.

Exonerated: An Evening with Sabrina Butler-Smith

Join us to hear Sabrina Butler-Smith share her story of wrongful conviction, six years of imprisonment and nearly three years spent on Mississippi’s death row before finally being exonerated in 1995.

Sign our petition!

In September, Pope Francis asked all people of good will to mobilize to abolish the death penalty. Now is the time for Georgia Catholics to mobilize for the protection of human life and dignity in our laws.

Georgia Death Penalty Abolition Week

Georgia Death Penalty Abolition week is a 3-day event raising awareness and advocacy against Georgia’s flawed, costly and discriminatory capital punishment system.

Pope Francis prays to end the death penalty

Pope Francis’ prayer intention for the month of September is for the worldwide abolition of the death penalty.

GACADP News

Archbishop Hartmayer opposes scheduled execution

The Atlanta archbishop is opposing the execution of a man who has been on death row for 46 years.

New Vigil Information – Execution Date Set for Virgil Presnell Jr.

The state of Georgia announced that Virgil Presnell Jr. is scheduled to be executed on Tuesday, May 17, at 7:00 p.m.

Webinar – Catholic Social Teaching and Restorative Justice

This lunch hour presentation will look at Catholic social doctrine and restorative justice, as well as the very real impact restorative approaches can have in our criminal legal system.

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt: Intellectual Disability and the Death Penalty

On January 25th, Georgia Catholics Against the Death Penalty hosted a webinar entitled “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt: Intellectual Disability and the Death Penalty.” The webinar featured Brian Stull, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Capital Punishment Project and lead counsel on the Young vs. Georgia case, a case which may be taken up by the U.S. Supreme Court and seeks to challenge Georgia’s unreasonably high burden of proving intellectual disability. Additional panelists include Maggie Rousseau (Director of Disabilities Ministry) and Jayna Hoffacker (Associate Director of Justice and Peace Ministries) of the Archdiocese of Atlanta, and Frank Mulcahy, Executive Director of the Georgia Catholic Conference.

We invite you to watch a replay of the webinar here:

The slides used during the presentation can be downloaded here.

As always, we appreciate your feedback. If you participated in the webinar online, or watched the replay, please take a moment to fill out a short evaluation and let us know what you thought of the webinar.

Webinar – Beyond a Reasonable Doubt: Intellectual Disability and the Death Penalty in Georgia

Georgia Catholics Against the Death Penalty invite you to join us for a discussion on intellectual and developmental disabilities, what Georgia’s standard of proof means for people with disabilities and actions we can all take to work toward the reform of our criminal justice system.

Webinar – Not in Our Name: The Road to Abolishing the Death Penalty in Georgia

As we look toward the start of the Georgia General Assembly’s 2022 Session in January, the Archdiocese of Atlanta and Georgia Catholics Against the Death Penalty invite you to join us as we discuss the many roads to abolition and how you can join the movement to end the death penalty in our state.