Capitalizing on Seeds of Doubt

Groups opposed to death penalty spotlight civil-rights issues

Growing public unease about capital punishment is breathing new life into an old movement.

Nonprofit groups that oppose the death penalty are developing bold tactics — and winning new donors — in their fight to abolish or restrict capital punishment. Such groups are working to build on the momentum created by a recent string of highly publicized cases in which inmates held for years on death row were exonerated thanks to DNA testing and other new evidence.

In addition, they are calling attention to a growing collection of studies showing that minorities, particularly blacks and Mexican Americans, are more likely to be handed a death sentence than other offenders convicted of similar crimes, and that death sentences are most frequently imposed when the victim in the case is white.

The recent developments have helped persuade a small but growing pool of foundations and major donors to put money into a politically and emotionally charged crusade. Many are small, little-known grant makers like the Paul Green Foundation, in Chapel Hill, N.C., which gets its money from royalties from the playwright’s work. But the movement also now has as an ally in the Open Society Institute, a New York foundation created by the philanthropist George Soros that has $300-million in assets.

Twice as many grant makers are supporting death-penalty projects today compared with six years ago, sources say, making the total nearly a dozen. Members of the Funders Collaborative for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, which includes the majority of foundations that make grants in this area, gave $2.8-million last year for such programs. And the grant makers are actively trying to recruit many more of their colleagues to get involved.

Signs of Change

Nonprofit groups seeking to restrict or abolish capital punishment are being bolstered by signs that the debate around the issue may be starting to shift. Says Diann Rust-Tierney, director of the capital-punishment project at the American Civil Liberties Union, in Washington: “To the extent that people felt, ‘I’m with you, but there’s never going to be a change,’ that argument is gone.”

Support for the death penalty dropped to 66 percent among Americans last year, its lowest level in 19 years, Gallup surveys showed. In Illinois, which has exonerated more people on death row than it has executed since it reinstated the death penalty in 1977, Republican Gov. George H. Ryan last year imposed a moratorium on capital punishment while a commission studies why so many errors were made. And the list of critics of the death penalty has started to include a number of prominent conservatives, including the Rev. Pat Robertson and commentator George Will.

Organizations that favor capital punishment say they have found it particularly challenging to raise money in the current climate.

One longtime supporter of the death penalty, the Washington Legal Foundation, has even stopped taking a stand on the issue, according to the group’s spokeswoman, Erin Grant, because of concerns that it will detract from the group’s ability to raise money for its other activities. The death-penalty issue “hurts on the development side,” she says. The free-enterprise group has a $4-million budget for its litigation and public-education work on a wide range of issues, such as its recent court challenge of a Maine law that sets the price of all prescription drugs sold in that state.

‘Need for Critical Review’

Officials at Justice for All, in Houston, one of the most outspoken and visible supporters of the death penalty, has no paid staff and struggles to raise its budget of less than $30,000 a year, most of which comes from individuals.

Dianne Clements, who helped start the group in 1993 after her 13-year-old son was killed by another boy, says her organization has never tried to raise money from foundations. But she says the success of groups on the other side of the issue may help her persuade some grant makers in the future to support her organization’s efforts, which include testifying against moratorium bills and attempts to exclude certain types of defendants, such as those who are mentally retarded, from capital punishment.

“There is an extreme need for critical review of the statements that are made by antideath-penalty organizations and individuals,” says Ms. Clements. “We can never have a fair system unless all of the issues are on the table.”

Jan C. Miller, president and co-founder of a sister organization to Justice for All known as Citizens Against Homicide, in San Rafael, Calif., has no illusions about how hard it will be to draw foundations and other new donors to her group because of its close association with death, murder, and grief. With a budget of less than $50,000 a year, the group assists police and district attorneys in bringing suspects to trial, helps members of murder victims’ families understand the criminal-justice system, testifies at clemency hearings for death-row inmates, and encourages its members to write letters in favor of execution.

While such work is vital, says Ms. Miller, whose daughter was murdered in 1984 by a killer who still has not been found, “it is just very, very negative.”

Science and Statistics

Advocates on the other side of the issue have long faced many of the same fund-raising challenges. But many who criticize the death penalty hope that the recent scientific and statistical developments will help them make their case to donors in civil-rights, rather than moral, terms. By so doing, they hope to achieve some of the financial successes seen by other activists, such as gun opponents, who have pitched their cause as a public-health issue as well as a criminal-justice concern.

While many activists are themselves motivated by the moral argument that taking a life is wrong no matter what the circumstances, some are now modifying their message to emphasize the risk of sending an innocent person to death.

“That is proving to be fertile ground for organizing moratorium efforts, which in our view will ultimately help lead us to abolition of the death penalty,” says Steven W. Hawkins, executive director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, in Washington. His group and others are working state by state to get moratorium bills introduced and passed.

This year, 19 states have considered or are considering bills for moratoriums or outright abolition of the death penalty, according to Richard C. Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, in Washington.

Illinois currently is the only state with a formal moratorium in place, but Mr. Hawkins is confident that others will join it. “We cannot live in a society where innocent people are executed,” he says, “and that’s, I think, winning over some hearts and minds.”

Recruiting Foundations

While antideath-penalty groups have recruited some new foundation donors in the past couple of years, the number of foundations that have jumped into the death-penalty issue remains tiny.

Michael S. Joyce, president of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, in Milwaukee, says conservative foundations like his have been quiet on the issue. “It’s not an issue that I see coming up much in foundation activity, except so far as groups that oppose the death penalty,” he says.

Members of the Funders Collaborative for Alternatives to the Death Penalty and others are hopeful that many more of their colleagues will get involved.

“Reasonable minds can disagree about the morality of capital punishment, but reasonable minds can’t disagree that there’s something terribly wrong about the way the death penalty is being applied in this country,” says Neil A. Stanley, a program officer at the Public Welfare Foundation, in Washington, which is a member of the collaborative.

The Arca Foundation, a family foundation in Washington, last June convened a meeting to bring attention to the issue, gathering together 50 grant makers and nonprofit leaders from various factions of the antideath-penalty movement.

Out of that meeting emerged the Death Penalty Mobilization Fund, housed at the Tides Foundation, in San Francisco. Unlike many foundations, which only award money a few times a year, the fund writes checks monthly and provides groups with rapid-response cash for such things as a public-relations campaign in behalf of a particular inmate, or to send an advocate for death-penalty reform to a government hearing.

Grant recipients are chosen during regularly scheduled conference calls between Kathleen W. Lee, a program officer at Tides, and a group of activists. Since the fund started in November, it has attracted $108,000 from individuals and has given away $61,000.

Betsy Fairbanks, executive director of the Fund for Nonviolence, in Santa Cruz, Calif., who helps advise the Tides Foundation effort, says that, with grants from the mobilization fund of around $5,000 each, “we’ve been able to make a lot of projects possible” that would have been “underneath the radar screen” of most foundations. Such money is coming at a key time for death-penalty groups, she says: “An infusion of money right now is a very strategic thing.”

ProTex: Network for a Progressive Texas, in Austin, got just such an infusion last year: $100,000 from two grant makers, the Public Welfare Foundation and the Open Society Institute. The group asked for the money so it could hire an advocate to coordinate the work of organizers around the state who are pushing for a death-penalty moratorium and other criminal-justice reforms.

Seeing a similar rise in fortunes has been People of Faith Against the Death Penalty, a Chapel Hill, N.C., organization that is seeking to halt executions until a study can be done to determine how fairly the death sentence is being applied. The Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, in Winston-Salem, N.C., awarded the group $75,000 last year.

Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation, a Cambridge, Mass., group that encourages relatives of murder victims to speak out against capital punishment, has seen its budget triple in the past two years, to $220,000, thanks in part to foundation grants.

But Robert Renny Cushing, a former New Hampshire legislator who runs the group, says much more is needed. “I could give you the list of foundations that haven’t funded us, and it’s devastating,” he says.

Guiding Principles

Much of the grant making being done today on this issue can be traced back to a push in 1999 by Susan R. Clark, executive director of the Columbia Foundation, in San Francisco, and Tanya E. Coke, who directs Open Society’s Gideon Project, which makes grants to improve the administration of justice.

Together with the J. Roderick MacArthur Foundation, in Niles, Ill., the women held a pivotal death-penalty strategy meeting, inviting speakers from the antitobacco, gay and lesbian, and gun-control movements — efforts that “had made significant strides in advocacy against significant public opposition,” says Ms. Coke.

Attendees at the meeting came up with four principles to guide their work:

• Campaigns should focus on the “fairness” issue: that the death penalty, as it is applied, violates basic civil and human rights.
• The political process, not the courts, is the most likely avenue for change, and while foundations cannot earmark money for lobbying on specific pieces of legislation, they can give general support that can be used for that purpose, as well as pay for full-time staff members, public-relations training, and other efforts to help professionalize the movement.
• Nonprofit groups should wage campaigns for incremental change, such as the abolition of the death penalty for juveniles, or statutes allowing for post-conviction DNA testing.
• The movement needs new faces and unusual champions who can captivate the public.

While grant making is done individually by members of the collaborative, they confer before making a gift to be sure they are meeting as many of the movement’s diverse needs as possible.

And the collaborative has another purpose: “It’s helpful to have a community of funders to persuade trustees that this is a valuable and viable investment,” says Ms. Coke of Open Society. “It’s difficult to have polite conversation around the water cooler on this issue, much less consensus that it be funded.”

Big Gifts From Individuals

In addition to foundations, the antideath-penalty movement has started to attract some major individual donors.

Arwen Bird, a Portland, Ore., philanthropist who gave $60,000 last year to support efforts to repeal that state’s death penalty, says that relatively small amounts of money can make a big difference, especially as the public seems more receptive to criticism of capital punishment than in the past. She says, “There is ample funding for less-controversial charitable causes.”

Bobby Muller, president of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, and his wife, Solange, whose father was the Chicago businessman J. Roderick MacArthur, have put more than $1-million into the Justice Project, a Washington advocacy group. The couple started the organization in 1999 to focus on issues of fairness in the justice system.

“I don’t think we’re going to get where we need to go on the basis of $20,000 grants,” Mr. Muller says. “The extraordinary wealth that is out there today can be given purposeful political engagement and can make a difference.”

Mr. Muller — co-founder of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 — was instrumental in persuading the Funders Collaborative for Alternatives to the Death Penalty that the movement’s best hope could be found in politics, not the courts.

The Justice Project persuaded Sen. Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, to introduce the Innocence Protection Act last year — and to reintroduce it earlier this month with 145 co-sponsors, including both Democrats and Republicans. The legislation would ensure that defendants facing the death penalty would have access to DNA testing and competent legal representation.

Death-penalty activists hope more donors interested in civil-rights issues will be motivated to support such efforts in the future. The next few years, they say, will be a critical time.

“It’s a window of opportunity,” says Mr. Hawkins of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. “And the window can close just as quickly as it opened.”

FOUNDATION GIVING AND THE DEATH PENALTY: KEY GRANT MAKERS