Name: Abigail (Gail) Pena

Social Justice Group: Prisons: The Death Penalty (C)

Date of Fieldwork: January 18, 2025

Name of Organization and person (people) with whom you met and their title(s):Death Penalty Project – Louise Normand

What I did and what I learned about my topic, activism, social justice work or civil and human rights work from this fieldwork:

On January 18, 2025, my groupmates and I had a zoom interview with Louise Normand, a member of the Death Penalty Project located in London. She is a lawyer who works to take her clients out of death row, and has been in this job for at least 30 years. We asked her questions about what kind of work she does, and what communities are the most affected by the death penalty.

We learned that the Death Penalty Project is an organization that mainly focuses on getting people out of death row and provides free legal representation. It was founded in 1992, and has been thriving ever since. The organization has capacity building and training programs for lawyers who work there. They also publish articles and have debates on different cases. Normand told us that recently they’d been working on abolishing the death penalty in Zimbabwe, and they were successful.

Normand also told us about how false imprisonment has a lot to do with the death penalty being popular in some countries. For example, though she didn’t have any information on the U.S., she did talk a lot about the death penalty in other places in the world, such as Asia. Normand told us about how clients from there often come from vulnerable backgrounds. Based on her experiences, drug trafficking was criminalized a lot and the associates are targeted with the death penalty, but not the actual people behind it. This shows how people who come from poor communities are often susceptible to be exploited.