In 2025, EJUSA made the painful decision to end its death penalty program. For three decades, EJUSA played a pivotal role in ending the death penalty across the United States. But the legacy of our advocacy is important and we offer it here for educational purposes. And while we will no longer organize local and national efforts, we will continue to speak out against the death penalty as a fundamental piece of the racist punishment framework that our society uses as a response to violence.
The death penalty is the epitome of a system that targets the most vulnerable at every turn. People on death row often come from poverty. They are disproportionately Black or Brown. There’s a very good chance they experienced violence or other serious trauma long before they committed harm. Many have cognitive disabilities or severe, untreated mental illness.
And when they did something horribly wrong — something that may very well have been prevented had they gotten intervention for their struggles — only then did we finally pay attention…by focusing exclusively on how harshly to punish them…and whether or not to execute them.
The justice system devotes endless resources towards executions and mass incarceration, but far less to examining how those people ended up where they did or the many ways our society failed them before they got there.
It’s no surprise that our nation’s misguided approach to healing and justice culminates in the death penalty — a system deeply rooted in a legacy of racial oppression and terror. Executions, like lynchings before them, are a powerful tool for discarding the most vulnerable among us, allowing violence rather than preventing it.
We believe we cannot build a system that heals and restores while relying on laws that take a human life. That belief shaped EJUSA’s legacy of work to end the death penalty and continues to guide our vision of justice rooted in healing.
EJUSA played a national role in the movement to end the death penalty. Our work helped shift narratives around healing, racial justice, and violence — bringing values-based framing to a space that had long been dominated by retribution. Since 2007, 11 states across the nation have repealed the death penalty. EJUSA played a critical role in 8 of those victories, and supported the remaining three.
Over more than three decades, we’ve engaged with countless survivors — including family members of murder victims and of those who were executed. They have taught us so much about the healing required in the wake of violence and the profound role race plays in how the death penalty is applied. Because of their courage and honesty, we’ve been able to change the way people think and talk about capital punishment — through shared values like fairness, dignity, and compassion.
We cannot hope to build a system that heals and restores when laws that take a human life endure.
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