There’s a stillness that sits just beneath the surface of this work. A quiet that isn’t silence exactly, but a kind of hum – steady, insistent. It follows you home at the end of the day, curls around the edges of conversation, settles into your chest while you’re folding laundry or staring at your computer screen a little too long. I’ve only been in my role as Director of Communications with NCCADP a few weeks, but already I’ve come to recognize it. That quiet is the weight of knowing just how high the stakes are.
What I’ve witnessed so far has stunned me, not in its violence – though there is plenty of that – but in its tenderness. I’ve been welcomed into a movement led by people who have every reason to shut the world out, and who instead open their hearts wide enough to hold it. There is courage here, not just in the public fight to abolish the death penalty, but in the daily, often invisible acts of care. People hold grief and joy in the same breath. People make room for each other’s stories without flinching.
There’s fierce, practiced love in that. Love shaped by struggle, made sharper by time.
And then there’s the system we’re up against, relentless in its design.
I believe that we can live in a world where no one is sentenced to die. Where our response to harm is not more harm. Where our systems center the deep and difficult work of healing. I believe North Carolina can be part of that transformation.
I’ve worked in advocacy spaces long enough to know that cruelty is often cloaked in paperwork. But even still, I wasn’t prepared for the sheer density of the death penalty’s architecture in this state. The tangled legal history. The procedural mazes. The centuries of racial terror folded into law. It is so complex, so deliberately overengineered, it convinces people there must be wisdom, an order, behind it all, operating with precision and care. But this order is a performance, and underneath the performance is something much older and uglier: the desire to punish, to control, to disappear.
The death penalty is not justice. It is not closure, and it is certainly not safety. It is political theater dressed up in the language of the law. And it harms everyone it touches.
In these first few weeks with NCCADP, I’ve heard the stories of people who’ve survived death row, of families who’ve lost loved ones to murder and still resist the call for vengeance, of organizers who’ve kept this movement alive through fatigue and failure and heartbreak. I’ve met people who carry the full weight of this system in their bones and still choose, every day, to fight for something better. Their stories have settled into my body like new muscle.
I believe that we can live in a world where no one is sentenced to die. Where our response to harm is not more harm. Where our systems center the deep and difficult work of healing. I believe North Carolina can be part of that transformation.
We carry a long and brutal history here. But we also carry the seeds of something different. I see it in the people who show up again and again, not because it’s easy, but because they know that lives depend on it.
And now my sleeves are rolled up. I’m learning the landscape, the stories, the fault lines. Learning how to write and speak in a way that makes space for all that pain and the humanity that holds it. Learning how to carry this work with integrity and care.
That’s the journey, really: always learning, questioning, growing. For me, the shock of the unknown in my first days at NCCADP came with waves of uncertainty – shouldn’t I know this? But what I see again and again from the people in this movement is that no single moment defines the entirety of a human life, and no person is any one, static thing. It’s all the moments, all the steps we take, and I am so unbelievably grateful that I’m not walking alone. One hand is held by the person before me, while my other hand is reaching back to help someone else take the step I just took. Let’s keep marching forward together.
