Founded in 1976, MVFR is a national organization of family members who have lost a loved one to execution or murder and who oppose the death penalty.

MVFR members help their neighbors, the press and policy makers understand the negative impact that capital punishment has on the families of victims and the condemned. Capital trials divert scarce resources from victim services and law enforcement. The press coverage and trials keep re-opening old wounds and prevent families from healing, which does not bring solace or hope. Finally, the execution creates another family with a son or daughter, husband or wife, brother or sister, lost to violence.

MVFR is a registered 501c(3) charitable organization.

Board

MVFR’s Board of Directors is comprised of murder victim family members, family members of the executed, and supporters.

Lorry Post, Executive Director
After serving 35 years as a Legal Services attorney and a housing and community development specialist in low- income communities, Lorry Post took on the cause of abolition of the death penalty in New Jersey and in the nation ten years ago. Along with four others, he initiated an organization that is now called New Jerseyans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (NJADP). This year, that organization helped secure a moratorium on use of the death penalty together with establishment of a Study Commission to study every aspect of the death penalty as it applies in New Jersey. Lorry has been an active member of MVFR for nine years, and has spoken at churches, synagogues, schools, Amnesty International groups and other civic organizations on more than one hundred occasions. For the past five years, he has been a volunteer in a New Jersey Department of Corrections program, wherein he enters into dialogue with inmates in state prisons throughout New Jersey, discussing the consequences of acts of violence, including his own personal story, and what they can do to avoid further anti-social behavior upon release. As an adjunct of this effort, he has been planning a program to help some of these men and women with their reintegration into society.

Pat Clark, Chair
Pat Clark is a consultant with the Center for Policy, Planning and Performance. She recently served as the executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the United States affiliate of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, an organization with programs that advocate for demilitarization an nuclear disarmament, racial and economic justice, and peaceful resolution of conflicts.

A graduate of Smith College, she has worked as the National Criminal Justice Representative for the American Friends Service Committee (1994-2002), focusing on such issues as the death penalty, hate crimes, prison reform, alternatives to incarceration, juvenile justice and restorative justice. Before that she was director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's KlanWatch Project.

In June of 2004, Pat Clark was one of seven commissioners appointed to the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Her current community involvement includes service on the boards of directors of the Southern Poverty Law Center and Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation and the Board of Advisors of Habitat for Humanity International, an organization with which she served nearly three years in Zaire, Africa. She has served on a number of other boards
that include the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, Habitat for Humanity International and the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana .

Cathy Ansheles
Cathy is the Executive Director of the New Mexico Criminal Defense Lawyers Association and was a founding member of the New Mexico Coalition to Repeal the Death Penalty. 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 organizing work in North Carolina, lived and taught in Eshinutsa, Kenya, was director of the Alabama Prison Project (APP), and helped found Aid to Inmate Mothers (AIM).

Georgi Fisher
Georgi Fisher is a social worker in Richmond, Virginia. She serves as the Co-Director of the Virginia Harm Reduction Coalition, a program focused on street-based harm reduction services for IV drug users and sex workers. Georgi has been doing advocacy work surrounding murder victim families and substance abuse since the late 1990’s. She has been fortunate enough to work with Barry Mccaffrey and Carroll O’Connor on issues surrounding substance abuse and public policy. Georgi has been featured on PBS, CBS, MSNBC, the Montel Williams Show, and several radio talk shows for her work surrounding murder victim families, substance abuse policy, and death penalty abolition work.

Georgi’s organizing work began after her sister, Wendy, was murdered in 1996. Understanding the intersections of substance abuse, prostitution, and homicide, Georgi believed that it was important to begin doing advocacy surrounding substance abuse, prostitution, and homicide. Her work led her into correctional social work where she began treating individuals convicted of violent crime, including murder. It was during this time that she realized the very real consequences of capital punishment for offender’s family members and the lack of closure that it brought to victim family members. While treating violent offenders, Georgi became involved in death penalty abolition work as a murder survivor. She’s feels grateful for her experience as a correctional social worker, as a survivor of homicide, and the great impact that they are both having on her work and her own journey through grief and into recovery.

Janis Gay
Janis Gay was 21 when she learned her maternal grandfather, Alex Kels, was hanged in Folsom Prison, 1924. after the first conversation, she and her mother spoke about her grandfather less than half a dozen times before her mother’s death in 1997, when Janis was 50. Even though there had been newspaper articles on her grandfather in her lifetime, Janis never spoke of him to her friends, emulating her mother. After extensive therapy, Janis began the often exhausting journey to discover her grandfather and his story. In 2000 Janis learned about MVFR and has since become its California point person while closely working with Death Penalty Focus in San Francisco. Janis and DPF Board member, Dick Wollack, have recently started the Wine Country Chapter of Death Penalty Focus. Janis speaks and writes about the experience of an execution in a family.

Jene O'Keefe Trigg
Managing Director at Pro-Media, has nearly 15 years of experience in strategiccommunications, event production, media relations and celebrity coordination.O’Keefe Trigg focuses her talents on human rights and criminal justice issues,harnessing her passion for those whose voices are often unheard. Her clientshave included Safe Horizon, Death Penalty Information Center, Dads & Daughters,Active Voice/Innocence Project and the Election Protection Coalition.

Prior to Pro-Media, O’Keefe Trigg was the executive director (and hiredoriginally as the development director) of The Moratorium Campaign, a nationaleducation campaign working for a temporary halt on the death penalty in theUnited States. At Pyramid Communications, a public affairs firm in Seattle,O’Keefe Trigg specialized in media relations, special events and coalitionbuilding. Her clients included Legal Aid of Washington Fund, Columbia LegalServices, the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee and the 2000 Gore Campaign.O’Keefe Trigg also worked at Parsons & Associates as a project managerwhere she specialized in strategic planning, graphic identity development andmedia relations.

O’Keefe Trigg continues to assist with publicizing the wrongful convictions ofthree men known as the West Memphis Three, utilizing her skills to help educatethe legal community as well as the public of this injustice. O’Keefe Trigg hasa degree in public relations from the University of Washington.

Terry Rockefeller
Terry Kay Rockefeller is a documentary film producer whose work is often seen on PBS. She attended Radcliffe College, Harvard University and The Johns Hopkins University where she studied government and U.S. history. Rockefeller lives in Arlington, Massachusetts with her husband, J. William Harris, who teaches history at the University of New Hampshire. They have two daughters, Logan (23) and Hannah (17).

Following college, Rockefeller went to work at WGBH-TV (PBS, Boston) where she was a member of the team that created the long-running science series, NOVA. Among her other credits are episodes of Eyes on the Prize, a history of the civil rights and black power movements, and The Great Depression, both produced at Blackside, Inc., America’s leading African-American production company. She is currently producing a feature-length documentary on the emerging religious-environmental movement in the U.S.

Terry’s sister, Laura Rockefeller, was killed in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Laura lived in Manhattan and worked as a free-lance singer, actor and theatre manager. On September 11th, Laura was working for two days to help run a conference on information technology on the 106th floor of the North Tower.

Since May of 2002, Rockefeller has worked with September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows to honor her sister’s life and try to insure that other families throughout the world do not experience the tragic and violent deaths of their innocent relatives. Rockefeller is chair of the steering committee of Peaceful Tomorrows. In January of 2003, she traveled to Iraq as part of a citizen-to-citizen delegation to oppose US military action against that nation. She has represented Peaceful Tomorrows at the World Conference against Atomic & Hydrogen Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 2003; at the Global Peace Initiative of Women in Amman, Jordan, December 2004; and at the 2005 Initiatives for Change conference in Caux, Switzerland. She speaks regularly throughout the US about the need for non-violent responses to terrorism and pro-active efforts to work against the root causes of hatred and violence.

In 2006, she and twelve other 9/11 family members appeared as witnesses for the defense in opposition to the death penalty for confessed al Qaeda member Zacharias Moussaoui. Along with several other 9/11 relatives she met with and continues to be in contact with Moussaoui’s mother, Aicha al-Wafi, who lives in France.

David Whettstone
David Whettstone 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. In recent years, David has worked on the death penalty, gun violence prevention, restorative justice, the prison industrial complex, ex-prisoner re-entry, and juvenile justice. Presently, he is a consultant to the American Friends Service Committee's Listening Project: African Americans and the Death Penalty.

Based in Washington, D.C., David recently finished an eight-year tenure as Legislative Associate for Domestic Affairs with Mennonite Central Committee Washington Office. While there, his portfolio also included civil rights and liberties, religious freedom issues, Native American/First Nations policy, peace concerns and a criminal justice focus on the death penalty, gun violence prevention, prisons, ex-prisoner re-entry, restorative justice issues and racial disparities.

He authored Supreme Court amicus brief contributions – Atkins v. Virginia and Roper v. Simmons – for the MCC Washington Office. In conjunction with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, he solicited contributions from about 40 other religious organizations regarding these cases.

David is an active participant with the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and the Ad Hoc Committee on the Death Penalty.

A native New Yorker, he lived in Grand Rapids, MI in the mid-1980s and then moved to Washington in 1993. Since then, he has consulted for: Thurgood Marshall Center for Service and Heritage, Congress of National Black Churches, Information & Services Clearinghouse – Howard University School of Divinity, Center for Substance Abuse Prevention, and The Widemeyer Group.

David attended Columbia and Calvin College and has studied in the areas of religion and theology, political science, and urban studies. He has professional expertise regarding antiracism concerns, constituent education and support, coalition building, community and media relations, organizational development, and strategic planning.

Juanita Perez
Juanita lost her son, granddaughter,and granddaughter’s mother to murder—and she is a passionate and vocal opponent of the death penalty. As Juanita says, “My experience in losing my family to homicide has been devastating and life changing…How can I support the death penalty when I know full well the consequences of losing those we love? I choose not to put any other family in this position, the everlasting emotional and financial costs are too much.”

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, is extremely involved in his local community, and is the
proud husband of the beautiful Mrs. Aidil Collins.