Speakers for Conferences
If 67 million Catholics understood the Catholic Social Teaching of the church, there would be no Death Penalty.
Vicki Schieber
Vicki Schieber and Equal Justice USA are available to teach educators how to present the one hour Workshop. They are willing to give a teaching workshop at National and State Conferences for Religious Educators, Social Justice Ministers, Pro-Life Activists and other interested groups. Please call 202-232-2881 or 301-865-6382 to schedule. (Read article about Vicki's story)
Vicki's Bio
Vicki Schieber's daughter, Shannon, was raped and murdered on May 7, 1998 while finishing her first year of graduate school on a full scholarship at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Since this tragic incident, Vicki and her husband, Sylvester, have dedicated their career and lives to a moratorium on the death penalty. In addition to teaching many high schools and university classes on abolition, Vicki runs workshops for state conferences, is a published author, and served on the 2008 Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment. She is now actively teaching the Catholic Social Teaching on the Death Penalty with the Catholic Mobilizing Network to End the Use of the Death Penalty. Vicki is the recipient of the Fannie Mae Foundation Good Neighbor Award, the Courage in Community Award of the McAuley Institute Board of Trustees and the Exceptional Community Spirit Award from Rebuilding Together of Washington, D.C. Despite her tragic loss, she does all this in the name of Catholicism, citing that "The death penalty is against our religion, a belief system in which life is held to be sacred."
Richard Dowling
Dick Dowling is a long time advocate for the Catholic Church's Social Teachings and has been instrumental in his role as Director of the Maryland Catholic Conference championing the death penalty issue.
Dick's Bio
Dick Dowling is the recently retired executive director of the Maryland Catholic Conference, a position he held since late 1984. Headquartered in Annapolis, the Conference represents the mutual public-policy interests of the Catholic bishops serving Maryland in the Baltimore, Washington, and Wilmington (arch)dioceses.
Mr. Dowling is a native of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and a graduate of Scranton Preparatory School and the University of Scranton. His master's degree was earned at Boston University's School of Public Communication, his Juris Doctorate at the Georgetown University Law Center. He is a recipient of The Saint Thomas More Society's Man for All Seasons Award, presented annually to Maryland attorneys who exemplify the spirit and ethics of the 16th Century lawyer, writer and statesman; the Ignatian Volunteer Corps’ Della Strada Award; and the Frank O’Hara Award, the highest honor bestowed jointly by the University of Scranton and its Alumni Society. He is a past president of the National Association of State Catholic-Conference Directors.
Prior to joining the Conference, Mr. Dowling was a National Leadership Fellow of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the first nonacademic to have been granted a Kellogg fellowship award. The fellowship enabled study at M.I.T., the University of Southern California, Louisiana State University, and in Brazil.
Following his undergraduate work, he was a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army. During and following his law-school years, he served as legislative assistant to former U.S. Congressman and Senator William D. Hathaway of Maine and, thereafter, as director of governmental affairs for the American Speech and Hearing Association, and as executive director of the American Society of Allied Health Professions.
Dick and his wife Marian, retired after 28 years on the Lower School faculty of the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, reside in Bethesda, Maryland. They are the parents of three daughters and the grandparents of three boys.
Sister Helen Prejean
Death Penalty Discourse Network
Sister Helen Prejean, a native of Louisiana, is known internationally for her tireless work against the death penalty. She was instrumental in sparking national dialogue on the issue and in shaping the Catholic Church's newly vigorous opposition to all state executions.
Sister Helen is a member of the Congregation of St. Joseph. She spent her first 24 years with the Sisters teaching religion to junior high school students and working within her community, first as religious education director and then as formation director. At the age of 40, she realized that being on the side of poor people was an essential part of the Gospel. She moved into the St. Thomas Housing Project in New Orleans and began working at Hope House, a center that assists public housing residents.
During this time, she was asked to correspond with a death row inmate. She agreed, and so began a new journey. In 1982, she started visiting Patrick Sonnier in Louisiana's Angola Prison. She became his spiritual adviser, worked to prevent his execution, and finally walked with him to the electric chair. She did the same thing with a second prisoner, Robert Willie. Concerned with the plight of murder victims' families she founded "Survive", which provides counseling and support for grieving families.
And then she sat down and wrote a book about the experience. The result was Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States, which Random House published in 1993. The book became a best seller, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and spawned an Oscar-winning movie and an internationally-acclaimed opera. Now Tim Robbins has made it into a play that is being performed by high school and college students across the country.
Since 1984, Sister Helen has divided her time between campaigning against the death penalty and counseling individual death row prisoners. She has accompanied six more men to their deaths. In doing so, she began to suspect that some of those executed were not guilty. This realization inspired her second book, The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions, which was released by Random House in December of 2004.
She is a regular interviewee and contributor to national and international publications, and has become a recurring presence on major TV news shows. Besides her degrees in English and religious education, Sister Helen has received honorary degrees from universities all over the world and numerous awards. Sister Helen lives in New Orleans and works with the Death Penalty Discourse Center and the Dead Man Walking Play Project. She is presently at work on another book - RIVER OF FIRE: MY SPIRITUAL JOURNEY TO DEATH ROW.