Ashley Conyers, a rising third year student at NCCU School of Law, and Deksyos Damtew, a rising second year student at UC Berkeley School of Law, have spent the summer months interning at CDPL as part of the Marshall-Motley Scholars Program. This prestigious program, named after Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker Motley (pictured above), is facilitated by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. The program is committed to “developing a cadre of civil rights attorneys whose work in the American South will usher in transformational change” by supporting students throughout their time in law school and beyond.

Convinced of the strong ties between slavery, lynching, and the death penalty, capital work is a natural fit for Ashley. Her interest in CDPL was sparked last year when one of our legal interns told her how working here motivated her to do impact litigation and capital defense. Then CDPL Board Vice President Terrica Ganzey invited Ashley to be her “plus one” at our annual fall fundraiser, where she was impressed by the significance of our work and the kindness of our staff. Fast forward several months, and Ashley has found herself here making her own contributions to both our work and office culture. She has enjoyed the variety of work she has gotten to do, from meeting clients on death row to jury investigations to reviewing court records for potential legal claims. Ashley has also appreciated the intentionality with which we treat our interns, citing our open-door policy, weekly check-ins, and the “Interns of Color” program as highlights.

Deksyos has likewise been an invaluable member of our summer crew. From an early age, Deksyos has been motivated to work with communities that have intersecting identities tied to race, class, and disability. For Deksyos, the death penalty is the largest signifier of how our country treats the disadvantaged. He has sought mentorship from the likes of Bryan Stevenson and now the staff at CDPL in his journey towards advocacy in this space. Like Ashley, Deksyos has enjoyed the variety of work he has been doing, particularly meeting with clients. This summer was the first time Deksyos ever visited an individual on death row. He was struck by the hospitality his client extended to a stranger, openly sharing about his life, his growth, and his current interests and passions. An out-of-towner, Deksyos has also getting to know Durham and the nature and community it has to offer.

We are honored that the Marshall-Motley Scholars Program would trust us with their scholars and grateful to Ashley and Deksyos for offering so much of themselves to us and our clients . We are excited to see their paths as advocates unfold and look forward to hosting future Marshall-Motley Scholars.

Kristin Collins is the outgoing director of public information at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation. As she prepares for new adventures in sailing and writing, we asked her to reflect on her time at CDPL.

In my nearly 15 years of working in death penalty communications, my goal was always to change other people’s hearts and minds. With the stories I told, I aimed to shape policies and public opinion — to help create a society that no longer sentences people to execution. Now, as I prepare to leave my job at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, it’s difficult to measure how much success I had in those areas. In the end, there is only one outcome I feel truly certain about: This work transformed my heart and mind.

I grew up on a cul-de-sac in suburban Pennsylvania in a family that was the opposite of counter-cultural. My main activities outside of school were watching TV and going to the mall. If I learned anything about the American criminal “justice” system, it was that anyone who got arrested must have done something to deserve it. In other words, I’m the last person you might have expected to end up marching in the streets to end the death penalty.

Before I joined CDPL, I spent 13 years as a newspaper reporter, where I began to learn about the world beyond my cul-de-sac. At my first job in the late 1990s, I covered crime and courts in Lenoir County, North Carolina. The injustices were so glaring that even I couldn’t help noticing them. One of my first big assignments was to cover the capital trial of a Black man the prosecutor described repeatedly as a “drug dealer from New York.” At the end of the trial, I wasn’t persuaded that he was guilty. Yet, he got a death sentence and remains on death row today. When I moved to the News & Observer in Raleigh, I covered immigration, which gave me the opportunity to meet undocumented immigrants, refugees, and horribly exploited workers. Yet, despite all the stories I wrote, my real education didn’t begin until 2010, when I started as a part-time contract writer for CDPL.

I was hired just as the first round of Racial Justice Act claims were filed. My job was to sort through clients’ stories and find those that best exemplified the death penalty’s racism. It was quite an initiation for a person who barely understood the meaning of the term “systemic racism.” As I read case summaries and legal pleadings, the facts of the crimes leapt from the pages, obscuring my view of the humanity beneath. Yet, people like Gerda Stein and Ken Rose didn’t write me off as clueless. Instead, they spent long hours explaining how the legal system works, describing the backgrounds of our clients, helping me see that crime springs not from evil but from pain.

A few personal stories Kristin shared over the years:

• A sermon at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Raleigh
• Op-ed: Jurors sent an innocent man to death row. Now they ask: “Where did we go wrong?”
• Blog post: I’m still learning what freedom really means for the wrongfully convicted

In 2014, I got the ultimate lesson in the death penalty’s cruelty. I was in the courtroom when Henry McCollum and Leon Brown were declared innocent more than 30 years after being sentenced to death. These two brothers were still children when they were stolen from their home and bullied into confessing to a rape and murder they had nothing to do with. It was my privilege to help Ken Rose express his feelings about having a client exonerated after three decades on death row.

I’ve had countless experiences working for CDPL that have reshaped my view of the world. Racial equity training changed not just my understanding of American history but of my own family’s story, revealing how whiteness influenced every aspect of my life. Visiting death row showed me the kindness, creativity, and deep humanity of the people we sentence to die. Hearing their life stories, I became aware of the immense suffering that our society inflicts on poor families, especially children.

However, the most transformative experience was one that accrued slowly. It came from watching my coworkers and fellow advocates. The reality of working against the death penalty in the American South is that, more often than not, you lose. Yet, my colleagues remain undaunted, refusing to give up even after heartbreaking losses, even when cases stretch on for decades, or when leaders fail to hear our calls for action. They work without any expectation of accolades or personal gain. They take the hardest cases without complaint. They not only defend the most despised people in our society, they love them. 

During my years at CDPL, I contributed to many projects of which I’m proud: Racist Roots, the statewide Racial Justice Act litigation, the campaign calling on Gov. Roy Cooper to commute death row, which resulted in 15 people being resentenced to life. However, what I take with me is not a list of accomplishments, but a few key lessons I learned from this community: Err on the side of offering grace and forgiveness. Put ego aside. Work for what’s right rather than what’s possible. Listen deeply to people’s stories. Always keep widening the circle of compassion. And never forget that our capacity for love is our greatest power.

Shelagh Kenney is CDPL’s deputy director. She has been a capital defense attorney since 2001 and represents eleven people on North Carolina’s death row. That number is significantly smaller than it was just a few months ago. On Dec. 31, Gov. Cooper granted clemency to 15 people on death row, commuting their sentences to life without parole. Eleven of those were CDPL clients and four of them were represented by Shelagh, along with co-counsel. We talked with Shelagh about what Gov. Cooper’s action meant for her clients and for the future of the death penalty.

You had four clients who received clemency from Gov. Cooper in December. Tell us how this came to be.

These commutations were the result of a lot of hard work by a large group of organizations and individual attorneys. Just to name a few of the organizations that worked for this outcome: the N.C. Coalition for Alternatives to Death Penalty, the N.C. Council of Churches, the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, the ACLU of North Carolina, and the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project. That list should also include my co-counsel and many other attorneys across North Carolina who worked diligently to submit clemency petitions.

These grants of clemency grew out of decades of effort to tell the stories of the death penalty’s many injustices. Of the cases Gov. Cooper selected for clemency, nearly all were tried in the 1990s. There have been advances in forensic science, in quality of counsel, in our understanding of eyewitness identification. Certainly, racism is inextricably intertwined with many of them. All of those are flaws we’ve worked to spotlight.

It’s also clear to me that Gov. Cooper took claims of innocence seriously, which is another issue CDPL has brought to the forefront. A number of those whose sentences were commuted raised issues related to wrongful convictions, including my client, Elrico Fowler. This is a case where there’s no forensic evidence and it’s clear that the eyewitness identification is flawed by modern standards. I’m grateful to the governor for recognizing the strength of those claims, even if we were unable to upend the convictions entirely.

Can you tell us why this grant of clemency was historic for NC?

North Carolina is one of the top five states in terms of death sentences, so we can’t compare ourselves to states like Oregon where governors have cleared death row on their way out of office. Gov. Cooper reviewed individual clemency petitions for 90 people on death row, and he found evidence of serious problems. In his statement announcing the commutations, he remarked on several important issues, such as the influence of race on capital trials and the sentencing of people with diminished mental and intellectual capacity. 

Gov. Cooper is the only North Carolina governor who has ever commuted a group of death sentences because of systemic problems with the death penalty. In the 50 years since modern death penalty statutes have been in place, North Carolina governors had granted mercy to only five people on death row, and each one of those was an individual decision made on the eve of an execution. Gov. Cooper’s decision to make a significant grant of death row clemency was a huge step forward for North Carolina.

How does this change the lives of your clients? What does it mean for them to be off death row?

For all four of my clients, the weight of a death sentence was ever-present. To be freed from that has been life changing. Elrico called me recently, and he’s been moved to a prison where he is now able to have contact visits. He told me he’d been able to hug family members that he had not hugged in more than twenty years. My client Iziah Barden told me he was able to walk in the snow for the first time in twenty-five years.

All of my clients who received clemency have expressed a desire to continue to improve themselves, to contribute, to be more a part of their families and of the prisons where they live. Now they’ll have more opportunities to get jobs, to take classes. Elrico is going to study for his GED. He’s wanted to get his GED for decades, and he did not have the ability to do that on death row.

As a criminal defense attorney, you had a lot of choices about who you could spend your career representing. Why did you choose to work with death sentenced people?

In law school, I got involved with a death penalty clinic and began to feel that the death penalty was our country’s greatest human rights violation. And I realized there was something I could do about it. I could represent people through all of their appeals.  This work can be draining, but I get to have relationships with clients over decades, and I find that life affirming and sustaining. At this point, I’ve known clients longer than I’ve been married and represented clients longer than my teenage child has been alive. 

Getting to know my clients’ stories so very deeply has made me recognize that we all have human frailties. I truly believe we’re all a couple steps away from being in the same place. There are times when I think, compared to public defenders or other attorneys with much higher case loads, the fact that I represent eleven people is so small. But to me, to save one life is to save many. I want to be part of a society that recognizes the humanity of each and every person. It’s my life’s work to represent those most vulnerable.

How did it feel to give your clients the news that they had received clemency?

Going to Central Prison on December 31 to share the news with four clients was beyond words. The palpable relief that I could see in their faces was so immediate. One of my clients was so emotionally overwhelmed that I think it was only a couple days later that he felt like he’d been able to process it. For another client, it was so important to have that recognition that he was deserving of mercy. But I also saw that some of them were very worried about the people they would be leaving behind on death row. They have friends still facing execution, and that weighs on them. 

One of your clients who received clemency was Hasson Bacote, who just won a major victory under the Racial Justice Act. Can you tell us a little about the racism you uncovered in his case, which compelled Gov. Cooper to act even before the judge made his decision?

Since the passage of the North Carolina Racial Justice Act in 2009, I’ve worked with an amazing team of attorneys to uncover racism in North Carolina’s death penalty cases. Most recently, during an evidentiary hearing in Mr. Bacote’s case, we brought to light shocking evidence that race played a key role in his trial and sentence. It’s far too extensive to summarize here, so I’ll just point out a few of the most egregious facts we uncovered.

First, the assistant district attorney who prosecuted Mr. Bacote called him a “thug” in front of the jury. This was a term he understood had racial connotations; he admitted that under oath. This same prosecutor called my client Iziah Barden, who fortunately also got a commutation, a “piece of trash.” He referred to other capital defendants as “predators of the African plain.” When we combined the data for all his trials, that prosecutor struck Black jurors at ten times the rate of white jurors. In Johnston County where these trials took place, every single Black defendant who proceeded to a capital sentencing hearing got a death sentence. But if you were white, the chances of death were only 50-50. Racism just infused those cases.

Tell us about some of your clients who remain on death row. Do you think Gov. Cooper picked the 15 most deserving people to receive clemency?

Certainly not. There are many other people on death row who are just as deserving of commutation as those Gov. Cooper selected. We have many clients with strong claims about their intellectual capacity who should not be executed. There are many other cases with shocking instances of racism. There are people who were severely mentally ill at the time of their crimes. There are people who were barely over 18 when they committed their crimes. There are also many people now on death row who are elderly and frail, and their ability to care for themselves is less and less each day. They are not a threat to others, they are not a threat to staff, and they could be serving their sentences in a place where they could get better care. 

Of course, I wish Gov. Cooper had granted clemency to everyone who applied. Yet, that shouldn’t diminish the action he did take. It showed me that we can speak to people in positions of power and they can hear the real truth about our clients. It gives me great hope that future governors in North Carolina and across the country can be moved by our clients’ stories.

A statement from Gretchen M. Engel, executive director of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation:

“CDPL commends President Biden for his courageous leadership today in commuting nearly all federal death sentences to life terms. At one time, CDPL worked on the cases of all three men on federal death row from North Carolina: Marcivicci Barnette, Richard Jackson, and Alejandro Umana. We have seen first-hand that the federal death row has the very same flaws that haunt North Carolina’s death row. It is deeply racist and a majority of those facing execution are people of color, some of whom were sentenced by all-white juries. Many federal death sentences are decades old and reflect different standards of justice. In such a deeply flawed system, there is the ever-looming threat of executing an innocent person.

“We urge Gov. Cooper to take a similar action to reduce the size of North Carolina’s death row. The threat of executions resuming in North Carolina is every bit as urgent as it was at the federal level. It will take bold leadership to move us away from the archaic and racist death penalty.”

If Tuesday’s election revealed anything about our country, it’s that we are deeply divided. However, Americans do seem to broadly agree that veterans should be revered for their service.

As we celebrate Veterans Day, we want to remind you that veterans make up about 10 percent of death row prisoners in the United States. In North Carolina, 15 percent of the 136 people on death row served in the military. In many cases, the legal system failed to give meaningful consideration to their service, despite research showing that overwhelming numbers of veterans suffer from post-traumatic stress.

While not every veteran sees combat, some of those on North Carolina’s death row experienced the horrors of war. After returning home, they were offered little support for dealing with their invisible wounds. In some cases, there is a direct line between the trauma they suffered and the crimes that led to their death sentences.

Warren Gregory has been on death row since 1993. He served in the first Gulf War, where his unit saw frequent combat. They endured oil fires, missile attacks, and artillery fire. Mr. Gregory received at least six decorations for his service including the Combat Action Ribbon and a Good Conduct Medal. Yet, when his service was complete, he received no screening for combat trauma. In the civilian world, he swiftly deteriorated. He began staying up all night to avoid nightmares. He turned to drinking and drugs and soon lost touch with reality. All were well documented signs of post-traumatic stress which, left untreated, led to violence.

In 1996, James Davis was sent to death row after committing a workplace murder while in the throes of psychosis. He was a veteran of the Vietnam War who survived two brutal combat tours and a shrapnel injury. After his time in the jungles of Vietnam, his combat experiences, combined with a history of severe childhood abuse, touched off severe mental illness. By the time of the crime, he was hearing voices and hallucinating. At his trial, he was so heavily medicated that his speech was slurred and he could not hold a coherent conversation.

Tragically, the jury that sentenced him to death never got to decide whether his combat trauma merited mercy. They heard almost nothing about his military service or his mental illness. In 2009, in a ceremony on death row, Mr. Davis received a long overdue  Purple Heart for his service in Vietnam.

As you honor veterans today, please take a moment to remember people like James Davis and Warren Gregory, who sacrificed their mental health for their country. Surely, veterans should be worthy of our mercy and compassion, rather than being subjected to our society’s harshest and most extreme punishment. 

What drew you to work with incarcerated people?

My first year of college at UNC-Chapel Hill, our assigned summer reading was Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. I had the privilege of meeting Mr. Stevenson when he came to our school and spoke about his work, and he signed my book. The book is about mass incarceration and the death penalty, and how people of color are treated in the system. In the book, Mr. Stevenson also talks about the importance of getting proximate to people who are directly impacted. That’s what led me to volunteer with kids at a juvenile detention center. That’s where I decided I wanted to be an advocate.

I quickly realized that a juvenile detention center is nothing more than a children’s jail. The kids there were locked in, separated from their families, and treated like they should be feared instead of cared for. Rarely did we see white children and almost all of the kids there were Black boys. These were boys who had been let down by the school system, lived in poverty, and had family and friends who’d been shot and killed or died of drug overdoses.

When I first started volunteering, I was 18, so I was close in age to many of the kids there. I realized that if my life had taken a different direction, or if I hadn’t had a supportive family, I could’ve been right where they were. When I graduated, I knew I wanted to become a defense attorney and help tell the stories of people who had been pushed away from society. From undergrad, I went straight to Duke Law so I could become a criminal defense attorney.

Why do you want to represent people who are guilty and have committed crimes as serious as murder?

You’re right that CDPL is not an innocence project. We represent people on death row and while some of our clients are innocent, we also represent people who are, in fact, guilty. For me, the way we treat people who have caused great harm is a deeply moral issue. As Bryan Stevenson says, we’re all more than the worst thing we’ve ever done, and if that is true, then we have to treat all people with dignity and respect no matter what they’ve done. We have to treat them with empathy and compassion. The death penalty is the exact opposite of that.

It’s also true that our society does not punish everyone who has caused great harm the same way. A lot of times, we punish people differently based on the color of their skin. As a society, we are much more likely to decide that a person of color, especially a Black man, is irredeemable. I completely disagree with the idea that some people are irredeemable and some people aren’t.

What’s the most challenging part of being a capital defense attorney?

As a criminal defense attorney, you’re always going to be the underdog. When going into a courtroom, you’re taking on the challenge of not just arguing a legal claim, but arguing for your client’s humanity. It can be challenging when people are sometimes so blinded by their preconceived notions that it’s impossible to get them to even consider the possibility that your client isn’t a monster. For me, it’s been disappointing to see people who claim they care about justice, but their justice has no space for people of color who have been accused of crimes. It has no space for people who struggle with poverty, who have mental illness, who have been let down by the system.

What would you like people to know about your clients?

They are some of the kindest, funniest, most loving, thoughtful people. Some of their stories are so harrowing to hear, the poverty and abuse they’ve lived through, the addiction. But then I see how different they are today, and I enjoy being with them. If more people could meet them, they would see what I see. These are not people who deserve to be executed.

Of the work you’ve done so far, what are you most proud of?

In 2024, I was counsel on the historic Racial Justice Act case, which discussed the racism in the capital punishment system. I was proud to be part of the team of attorneys representing Mr. Hasson Bacote in such a landmark case. Bryan Stevenson was our expert witness, and I went down to his nonprofit, the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama, to help prepare him for his testimony. It was such a full circle moment for me to work with someone who had inspired me to go to law school. I’m going to cherish that for the rest of my life.