MVFR’s Staff and board of directors is comprised of murder victim family members, family members of the executed, and supporters.
Staff
Board
Beth has been working on the issue of the death penalty for more than 10 years in both volunteer and staff capacities. She was initially drawn to the work through the teachings of her Catholic faith and its calls to act prayerfully and compassionately in opposition to executions taking place in Ohio, where she lived at the time. Beth served as a consultant with New Jerseyans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (NJADP) and since that state abolished the death penalty in 2007, she has served as a consultant in training and membership management roles with MVFR and Equal Justice USA (EJUSA). Beth holds an undergraduate degree in Elementary Education from the Wright State University and is dangerously close to completing her Master of Arts in Theology. Until her marriage to a roving anti-death penalty activist and the birth of their son Isaac in 2005, Beth was a Catholic elementary school teacher and an adjunct professor in mathematics at the University of Dayton in Ohio, and she plans to return to teaching as Isaac reaches elementary school age. Beth lives in Cheverly, Maryland with Abe, Isaac, and their cat Bucky Katt.
Emem Udofa, Office Manager and Bookkeeper
Emem Udofa, a senior transfer student at the University of Maryland University College is pursuing a Bachelor’s Degree in Accounting; after which she plans to pursue a Law Degree and ultimately become a Criminal Defense lawyer. Emem’s best friend was murdered in 2003. This experience heightened Emem’s interest in the role of murder victims’ family members in the criminal justice system. After working past the agony of losing a loved one, and self- educating on issues concerning murder and its punishments, she changed her views in 2006 and strongly believes in alternatives to the Death Penalty. She is now apart of the MVFR team as the Office Manager/ Bookkeeper in the Maryland Office.
Scott Bass, North Carolina Coordinator (sbass@mvfr.org)
Scott Bass is a North Carolina native whose experience includes working as a therapist with individuals and families who have experienced traumatic loss as well as organizing in faith-based and other settings. He is married to Roberta Mothershead with whom he partners in operating Nazareth House in Raleigh, NC, which offers support and hospitality to families of people on death row and also reaches out to persons whose loved ones have been taken by homicide. They have been active in North Carolina's recent efforts toward reform and abolition of the death penalty and they are advocates of restorative justice.
Chris Castillo, National/Texas Outreach Coordinator(ccastillo@mvfr.org)
Chris Castillo started his career as a reporter for a Texas newspaper. He was covering the court beat when he learned his mother, Pilar Castillo, had been murdered in her Houston home. Soon after his mother’s death he began working with crime victims in Jefferson County and attending their annual Candlelight Vigil. About 10 years ago he join a faith-based ministry called Bridges to Life, which takes crime victims into prison to help inmates see the impact of crime on the individual. It was through that program he found forgiveness. His involvement with prison ministry has continued. He volunteers with a Bible study group at the U.S. Federal Prison Camp in Beaumont, and has worked with Karios and Epiphany, programs aimed at bringing faith into the prison and changing the hearts of inmates. It is his goal to make a difference within in the world. For him, his work with MVFR is more than a job. It is a calling.
Pat Clark, Chair
Pat Clark is a program officer with the Fund for Nonviolence. She co-leads the Prison program and leads the Lifting Voices of Resistance program.
Recently Pat served as Director of the Newark-based Criminal Justice Program of the American Friends Service Committee’s New York Metropolitan Regional Office where she worked on reentry issues, monitoring the issues in prisons across the country and the development of the concept of a center for healing and transformative justice.
Previously she worked as the Executive Director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), an interfaith, international organization with programs in racial and economic justice, demilitarization, nuclear disarmament, and peaceful resolution of conflicts.
Prior to FOR, Pat served as the AFSC’s National Criminal Justice Representative based in Philadelphia. Her work focused on the death penalty, prison control units, hate violence and restorative justice, juvenile justice, prison reform and alternatives to incarceration. She was a moving force behind the creation and development of the Religious Organizing Against the Death Penalty Project and worked intently with Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation.
Additional work included serving as the Executive Director of Death Penalty Focus of California, Director of the Klanwatch Project with the Southern Poverty Law Center and as a volunteer with Habitat for Humanity International in Zaire, Africa.
Pat’s current community involvement includes service on the boards of directors of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the board of advisors of Habitat for Humanity International, and the Bread and Roses Phoebus Criminal Justice Grantmaking Committee. She has served on a number of other boards that include the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP), Interfaith Coalition of Advocates for Reentry and Employment, Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana (JJPL) and the Pennsylvania Prison Society.
Jené O'Keefe Trigg, Vice Chair
Communications and development director for the Innocence Project New Orleans Jené brings to MVFR her nearly 15 years of experience in strategic communications planning, branding, event production, media relations and celebrity coordination. Jené focuses her talents on human rights and criminal justice issues, harnessing her passion for those whose voices are often unheard. As managing director of Pro-Media Communications, a social issues public relations firm she worked with numerous nonprofits including but limited to the Correctional Association, National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP), Safe Horizon, Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) and the Election Protection Coalition. Jené also coordinated the New York premiere of the award-winning documentary After Innocence, a gripping, emotionally charged film that follows wrongfully convicted men freed by DNA evidence after decades in prison. Prior to Pro-Media, Jené was the executive director (and hired originally as the development director) of The Moratorium Campaign, a national education campaign working for a temporary halt on the death penalty in the U.S. At Pyramid Communications, a public affairs firm in Seattle, Jené specialized in media relations, special events and coalition building. Her clients included Legal Aid of Washington Fund (LAW Fund), Columbia Legal Services, the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee (LPDC), Mara Leveritt – author of Boys on the Tracks and Devil’s Knot and the 2000 Gore/Lieberman Campaign. Jené has also been a mentor with the Women’s Prison Association (WPA) and for over 10 years assisted with publicizing the wrongful convictions of three men known as the West Memphis Three (WM3), harnessing her expertise to help educate the legal community as well as the public of this injustice.
Ron Steiner, Treasurer
Ron resides for half the year in New Mexico and the other half in Oregon. He is presently retired. Ron was an asset to the NM Repeal Coalition Steering Committee that was successful in bringing about repeal in that state and brings those experiences with him to the Board of MVFR. Ron also brings with him a long history in the business world to the Board.
Hannah Yoo, Secretary
Hannah is an attorney residing in Chicago. She is a graduate of Loyola University Chicago - School of Law where she served as the elected Student Bar Association president and participated in the International Law Review Journal. In 2005, her father was murdered in South Korea. She has forgiven his killers and traveled to South Korea in order to meet with them. Additionally, she has traveled abroad to help in remote areas, such as in the nation of Ghana. Among other attributes, she applies her knowledge of the law in her work with MVFR. Hannah’s story is featured on the family stories section of this Web site.
Cathy Ansheles
Cathy, whose great aunt was murdered in New Jersey, helped bring together the early members of New Mexico's MVFR chapter and was one of the first family members to testify against expansion of the death penalty before the state legislature. One of seven children, Cathy began her grassroots organizing work in North Carolina, lived and taught in Kenya, was director of the Alabama Prison Project (APP), helped found Aid to Inmate Mothers (AIM), and worked with Equal Justice USA (EJUSA). She served on the boards of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and the American Friends Service Committee’s (AFSC) Religious Organizing Against the Death Penalty Project. Cathy was a founding member of the New Mexico Coalition to Repeal the Death Penalty and is currently executive director of the New Mexico Criminal Defense Lawyers Association.
Jeremy Collins
Jeremy is the campaign coordinator of the North Carolina Coalition for a Moratorium and the family member of two victims of homicide. Jeremy graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2002. Jeremy has served as field director for People of Faith Against the Death Penalty and as a grassroots organizer for Democracy North Carolina, a nonprofit nonpartisan electoral process and voting rights organization. He currently serves on the board of directors for several statewide organizations and is extremely involved in his local community.
Janis Gay
Janis Gay, a third generation Northern Californian, graduated from UC Berkeley (UCB) in 1970. After getting her teaching credential at Cal State Hayward, Janis began her career as a middle school Language Arts teacher in St. Helena. By the time she retired, she had received the highest honor for a California teacher, The Golden Bell, as well as a California State Legislature Assembly Resolution. Janis is now a receptionist with an accounting firm in Napa Valley. Janis was beginning her senior year at UCB, when her mother revealed that her father, Alex Kels, was hanged in Folsom Prison in 1924. Janis and her mother spoke about her grandfather few times before her mother’s death. The message was consistent. Don’t assume the shame; leave the story alone. Janis never spoke of her grandfather to her friends, emulating her mother. In 2000, Death Penalty Focus (DPF) had a conference, Committing to Conscience. There, Janis learned about MVFR whose acceptance gave her the will to speak out about her grandfather. She is now MVFR’s liaison for California Crime Victims for an Alternative to the Death Penalty (CCV), a project funded by contributions from MVFR, DPF and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Northern California. Janis speaks and writes of the experience of an execution in a family. “People assume violence ends with an execution. It doesn’t. The family is shattered by shame. Executions are society’s ultimate exile.”
Catherine Harrington
Reverend Catherine Harrington is a resident of Michigan. She is a UU Parish Minister in that state. Catherine’s daughter was murdered in Napa, CA and she attended the trial of her killer and is committed to walking the path towards forgiveness. Catherine is a follower of, and student of the principles of Restorative Justice and brings these beliefs to the MVFR Board. Catherine’s story is featured in the family stories section of this website.
David Whettstone
David is a public policy advocate and writer who works at national and local levels, particularly in the areas of civil rights and criminal justice with religious organizations and communities of color. For more than a decade, he has worked on the death penalty, gun violence prevention, restorative justice, the prison industrial complex, ex-prisoner re-entry and juvenile justice. Based in Washington, D.C., David recently finished an eight-year tenure as legislative associate for Domestic Affairs with Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) Washington Office. While there, his portfolio included civil rights and liberties, criminal justice, religious freedom issues, Native American/First Nations policy and peace concerns. He has written Supreme Court amicus brief contributions for Atkins v. Virginia and Roper v. Simmons, rulings which overturned the death penalty for persons who are clinically mentally retarded and for juveniles. In conjunction with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, he solicited contributions from approximately 40 other religious organizations regarding these cases. David is an active participant with the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP) and the Ad Hoc Committee on the Death Penalty. A native New Yorker, David moved to Washington D.C. in 1993. He has consulted for: Thurgood Marshall Center for Service and Heritage, Congress of National Black Churches, Center for Substance Abuse Prevention, The Widemeyer Group and the American Friends Service Committee's (AFSC) Listening Project: African Americans and the Death Penalty.
California Crime Victims for Alternatives to the Death Penalty Staff
MVFR, Death Penalty Focus (DPF) and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Northern California came together to form California Crime Victims for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (CCV) – a coalition of families, friends, and loved ones of murder victims who oppose the death penalty. The coalition supports families, friends, and loved ones in telling their stories and being heard. CCV educates the public about alternatives to the death penalty and provides information, resources, and support to families regardless of their views on the death penalty or whether the perpetrator has been apprehended.
Aarti Kelapure, Program Coordinator
Aarti is the program coordinator for California Crime Victims for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (CCV). She is interested in various criminal justice and social justice issues, namely the death penalty and wrongful convictions. Prior to joining CCV, Aarti volunteered as a research assistant for a member of the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice on prosecutorial misconduct, studied international human rights law at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Costa Rica, and volunteered at Death Penalty Focus (DPF). She has also volunteered at a children's homeless shelter and a shelter for battered women and their children. Aarti earned her Bachelor of Arts in sociology from University of California, Berkeley.
Judy Kerr, Northern California Victim Outreach Coordinator
Judy’s brother, Robert James Kerr, was found lifeless, shirtless, barefoot and without identification on July 12, 2003 in Everett, Washington. He had been brutally beaten and strangled. It took weeks for investigators to identify him. Judy spent that time becoming increasingly worried and finally alarmed when he did not arrive for a scheduled visit and when calls to his cell phone were answered by a stranger. She is still waiting for a suspect in her brother's death to be named and for justice to take its course. Judy’s grief is raw and unremitting but she is absolute in her conviction that another death will not serve her. Justice through execution is not the justice she needs and it is not the justice she wants in her country or her world. She has never and will never support the death penalty. She knows now, more than ever, that killing is wrong. Revenge will not bring her brother back and it will not bring her peace. She honors her brother's life and her memory of him by standing against the death penalty and working as the Victim Outreach Liaison / Spokesperson for California Crime Victims for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (CCV). The scars of his murder will never be gone but healing comes in many forms. Her story is offered here in the hope that her words will bring others to the realization that another death will not solve anything and that our voices as victims who oppose more violence must be heard.
Aqeela Sherrills, Southern California Victim Outreach Coordinator
Aqeela grew up in Watts in South-Central Los Angeles, an epicenter of gang violence. Each of the 10,000 victims of gang violence in Los Angeles County over the past 20 years was somebody’s daughter or son crying out for help. After seeing 13 friends killed in gang wars, he was inspired to bring the warring factions, the Crips and Bloods, together and end the violence. He was able to create a peace treaty between the gangs in 1992, which has sustained for over ten years—not without problems and challenges,however. For the past 16 years he has continued working for peace. But in January 2004, this belief was seriously tested when his 18-year-old son,Terrell, was murdered while on a break from college. Aqeela decided he did not want the person who killed his son to be executed, as it would only continue the cycle of violence. Aqeela joined CCV as an Outreach Coordinator for Southern California in January 2010.
