FADP Officers and Board of Directors: (L-R) Nancy O’Byrne (Chair), Mark Elliott (Executive Director), Mary Anne Hoffman, Dr. Joyce Hamilton Henry PhD MSW, Ingrid Delgado (Vice-Chair), Sheila Meehan, Dr. Joe Thornton MD (Secretary).
Not pictured: Dr. Laura Finley PhD, Christine Henderson, Dr. Maria Knoll PhD (Treasurer), Natishia Y. June, Steve Connelly, Elke Long, Rev. Dr. Glenn Dickson, Emily Chow (FADP Communications Strategist)
Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (FADP) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit and non-partisan Florida organization of individuals and groups united to abolish the Death Penalty in Florida. FADP works to build a strong, diverse, statewide, grassroots movement which:
- Opposes executions
- Reduces the application of the Death Penalty until it is ultimately abolished
- Protects the humanity of all persons impacted by the Death Penalty
- Educates Floridians about the Death Penalty
- Provides concrete action steps for individuals and groups
FADP Officers:
Mark Elliott, FADP Executive Director, is a native Floridian from Tampa. In 2004, he left a career in medical technology systems and began work to abolish the death penalty as the State Death Penalty Abolition Coordinator for AIUSA. His first assignment was working to help pass legislation to end the juvenile death penalty. In 2006, he became Executive Director of FADP – Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. Since then, FADP has become the statewide organization that represents the many various and diverse stakeholders in Florida’s struggle to abolish the Death Penalty.
Nancy O’Byrne, FADP Board Chair, retired in 2004 as Director of Leasing for a commercial real estate company that owned several office buildings in downtown Jacksonville. She decided to take a more meaningful path in her life by devoting much of her time to advocacy for peace and justice issues in her church and in her community.
She was the Chairwoman of the Catholic Diocesan Justice and Peace Commission for 13 years (2000 – 2013) and awarded the Thomas A. Horkan, Jr. Distinguished Catholic Leader Award by the Florida Bishops in 2012. She continues to coordinate execution vigils and she is currently Advocacy Chairwoman on the Board of Catholic Charities in the Diocese.
Nancy is the Organizer of the Compassion in Action initiative of Compassionate St. Augustine, which provides educational and advocacy programs for criminal justice and prison reform, and she facilitates Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) workshops for the youth and staff at the St. Johns Youth Academy, the juvenile detention facility in St. Augustine.
She is the Board Secretary of Home Again St. Johns, which plans to construct a Unified Services Center on S.R. 207 for the homeless, along with 80 units of affordable supportive housing for those in need of mental health and addiction services.
Nancy and her husband David are members of the St. Vincent de Paul Society in St. Augustine where they do home visits to low-income clients in need of financial assistance. They were recently appointed State Justice Coordinators for the Sisters of St. Joseph. They belong to Santa Maria del Mar parish and have been married for 25 years. They have 3 grown children and 7 beautiful grandsons.
Ingrid Delgado, FADP Board Vice-Chair, serves as Associate for Social Concerns & Respect Life at the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops where she represents the Catholic Bishops of Florida on issues of human life, dignity and social justice before the legislative and executive branches of government and community organizations. She works with Florida’s diocesan respect life directors through the State Pro-Life Coordinating Committee and staffs the Conference’s Prison Ministry Committee.
Previously, Delgado worked as a Program Coordinator/Training and Curriculum Development Specialist for ThinkSmart, a youth outreach program of Catholic Charities of Central Florida and later as a Match Grant Specialist and Case Manager for the organization’s Refugee Resettlement program. She has also served as a language arts teacher at an alternative high school in Central Florida and lived as a missionary in San Juan de la Maguana, Dominican Republic, helping to provide for the nutritional, medical, and educational needs of the residents in the poorest region of the Dominican Republic
Dr. Joseph Thornton, MD, FADP Board Secretary, is Associate Professor of Psychiatry, University of Florida College of Medicine and is Chief, Psychiatry Services, UFHealth Shands Hospital in Gainesville. From 2003 to 2010 Dr. Thornton served as the Medical Executive Director for the North Florida Evaluation and Treatment Center (NFETC). NFETC is a 200 bed maximum security forensic mental health treatment facility in Gainesville, Florida.
Dr. Thornton served on a National Health Service Corps assignment to Union Correctional Institution at Raiford, Florida from 1992 to 1996. In his role as the Medical Executive Director from 1994 to 1996 his duties included weekly walking rounds to see each of 300 inmates housed on death row. Ten years later as a psychiatrist for the NFETC he was called as an expert witness on competency to appeal death penalty sentences. As a physician, a psychiatrist who had worked on Florida death row, and as a physician among physicians who participate in executions, he has a specific responsibility to speak out against the death penalty and to put an end to medical killing.
María C. Knoll, Ph.D., FADP Treasurer, is a retired Project Director for the US Army and former Program Management college professor for the University of Phoenix. A graduate of the University of Miami as a computer engineer, Dr. Knoll earned her doctorate in Industrial Engineering with a concentration in management from the University of Central Florida
In addition to her service to FADP, Dr. Knoll invests her time as a volunteer for several advocacy organizations including serving on the Advisory Board for the Diocese of Orlando’s Human Trafficking Task Force, which in January 2019 was awarded the prestigious Polaris Award for its contributions in providing public awareness and support to human trafficking victims in the Central Florida area. Dr. Knoll is also a proud board member and Legislation Chair of the Council of Catholic Women (CCW) at Annunciation Catholic Church in Altamonte Springs, Florida.
FADP Board Members:
Steve Connelly has four-plus decades of management, executive, and consulting success in both the public and private sectors; and, has headed ConnVerge since 1986. He is committed to giving back to his community through advocacy and community-service programs devoting 10,000 lifetime hours of volunteer service. Permanently disabled, he has participated in religious ministries, job-placement, veterans and disabled assistance, human-dignity, civil-rights, LGBTQ, PTSD, justice-and-peace, autism, youth-services, cancer-support, historic-preservation, and wildlife-rescue causes.
As a business executive, senior Federal global program director, Naval Officer, and U.S. diplomatic-service family member, Steve has lived throughout the U.S., and in both Europe and the Near East, traveling in excess of one million miles and relocating his principal residence 28 times.
Steve’s wife, Ellen Middleton, is a multi-generational Floridian who manages a Jacksonville investment-consulting and financial-advisory firm. His Eagle Scout son, Mike, is both a Wharton MBA graduate and intellectual-property attorney who is approved to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court. Steve’s daughter, Caroline, is a published fine-arts professional and post-Masters certified museum historian and curator. All are proud products and strong supporters of the Florida educational system.
Rev. Dr. Glenn Dickson graduated from McCormick Seminary in 1977 with his Doctorate of Ministry. He served as pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Gainesville for 36 years and retired in 2009. Rev. Dickson has served as pastor to death row inmates from 1991 to present. He is Co-coordinator for Gainesville Citizens for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
Laura Finley, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Sociology & Criminology at Barry University in Miami Shores, Florida. She is the author, co-author, or editor of 18 books, numerous journal articles and book chapters, as well as a syndicated columnist with PeaceVoice. In addition, Dr. Finley is a member of many human rights, social justice and peace organizations and is co-founder of the South Florida Consortium for Restorative Justice.
Christine Henderson has an extensive history of working with communities and youth to improve the juvenile justice system at all levels. She has worked throughout Florida, in Jackson, MS and a variety of other communities in the South East to further advocacy and litigation efforts with Southern Poverty Law Center. She was often called upon to build coalitions, mobilize citizens, provide community action plans and train advocates to lobby for themselves and their communities. Christine was instrumental in helping build the case against an abusive juvenile justice facility, which was ultimately closed and she worked tirelessly to maintain pressure on decision makers to maintain certain standards of Juvenile care during a proposed legislative overhaul of the Juvenile Justice system.
Christine is currently Senior Strategist – Collective Healing, Equal Justice USA. Christine focuses a lot of her organizing in Jacksonville-Duval County, Florida as it has been in the top 3 of the most extreme counties nationally in use of death penalty. She also focuses on Miami-Dade, Hillsborough, and Pinellas-Pasco Counties – recently among the top 16 most extreme use death penalty counties on the U.S. and in Orange-Osceola Counties.
Joyce Hamilton Henry, Ph.D., MSW is Director of Statewide Initiatives for the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Florida and is based in Tampa. Dr. Hamilton Henry received a Master of Social Work degree from the University of Connecticut School of Social Work and a doctorate in Social Policy from the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. She was an Adjunct Professor at the University of Hartford in African American Studies and in the Departments of Sociology and Psychology.
She is known for her contributions in the field of social work and is published on the experience of Caribbean immigrants. She has expertise in a range of issues including race and ethnic relations, immigrant rights, voting rights, felon disenfranchisement and civic engagement. She is the author of No One Asked Us: The Under-representation of African Americans and Latinos on Local Boards and Commissions.
Mary Anne Hoffman has worked on death penalty issues since 1982. Her work and volunteer life have centered on affordable housing, homelessness, adult literacy and public benefits issues in both state government and non-profit organizations. In 2014 she retired from the State of Florida Office on Homelessness where she was a program coordinator. Mary Anne is the current chairperson of Tallahassee Citizens Against the Death Penalty. She also serves on the boards of Kindred Spirits Charitable Trust and Graceful Solutions for Housing, Inc.
Natishia Y. June is currently the Organizing Manager for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Florida, and a Jacksonville native. Natishia is a proud graduate of Florida Agriculture & Mechanical University (FAMU) with a degree in Criminal Justice and is a small business owner and author of “Greatness”
She is very passionate about social justice especially in the protection of women’s rights/ liberation, criminal justice & voting rights. Natishia is one of the founding members of the Justice 4 Jacksonville Coalition, a coalition to reduce death sentences in the 4th Judicial Circuit. Natishia has spoken across the country and the state of Florida on issues regarding death penalty, voting rights, rights restoration, immigration, LGBT and racial justice issues. Currently, Natishia serves in other civic organizations such as the Interfaith Coalition for Action, Reconciliation and Empowerment (ICARE), where she is on the Restorative Justice & Crime Committees, on the Business Advisory Council with the City Rescue Mission, and as Chairwoman of the Jacksonville Juvenile Justice Coalition & JCE Faith Committee. She has also served as a member of the Women’s Academic & Cultural Society working with young people, the National Council of Negro Women, and National Black HIV/AIDS Network.
Natishia previously worked as Project Manager for a faith-based youth program FISH Kids, Inc. and as a Health Educator for Shisa Inc. conducting HIV/AIDS testing, education and outreach to high-risk populations.
Elke Long was born and raised in the German Democratic Republic. She moved to the United States in 1993 and became a US Citizen in 2009. Elke inherently opposes the death penalty because she was born in the aftermath of the Third Reich and believes that no government should be given the right to decide who lives and who dies.
She has been a member of Tallahassee Citizens Against the Death Penalty – TCADP since 2014. In 2016 Elke joined the TCADP Board of Directors and is currently Board Secretary. As a family member of a death row inmate, Elke spoke at the “Rally in Tally” in 2014. She continues to engage with other family members of death row inmates to encourage them to take a stand against the death penalty and become part of the bigger movement.
Sheila Meehan is currently assistant director of the Florida Alliance for Consumer Protection (flacp.org). Sheila has worked as a corporate researcher at the national headquarters of the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C. and as a labor organizer for the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild where she organized reporters at the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun.
After returning to Florida she was the Administrator of the Community Services Team, the national pro bono department of Holland & Knight LLP. She assisted in representation of two prisoners on Florida’s death row and quickly realized that the death penalty justice system was broken. As the Assistant Director and founding staff member of the Innocence Project of Florida she soon saw a record number of people exonerated and released from Florida’s death row. These experiences brought her to activism on this important issue and as a volunteer she is past Chair of Tallahassee Citizens Against the Death Penalty (tcadp.net) and past Treasurer of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
Emily Chow joined FADP as the Communications Strategist in August 2016. Prior to FADP Emily worked for the ACLU of Florida as their Online Advocacy Coordinator communicating the affiliate’s advocacy, policy, and legal efforts to ACLU-FL supporters through their digital platforms, including designing multimedia content, creating action alerts, and implementing engagement strategies on social media in both English and Spanish. Before moving to Florida, Emily was the Senior Program Associate at the Latin America Working Group (LAWG), in Washington, DC where she worked with a coalition of grassroots, faith leaders, businesses and policy groups to advocate for the normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba. Emily has a BA in International Relations with a minor in Spanish and Latin American studies from American University. While she has moved extensively up and down the east coast, and currently resides in Washington, DC, she still calls Albany, NY home.