Death Penalty · Conservative Voices
Conservatives Concerned Names Its First Advisory Council as the Right’s Death Penalty Debate Grows
A network built on the idea that skepticism of capital punishment is a conservative position has just seated its inaugural panel of advisers. The timing is hard to miss. Florida is executing people at a pace the country has never seen.
Small government, big question.
Few powers a state holds are larger than the power to take a life, and for a growing number of conservatives that fact is exactly the problem. Conservatives Concerned, the national network of political and social conservatives who question whether capital punishment fits conservative principles, announced this week the formation of its first Advisory Council, a group that will serve from 2026 through 2028. The organization describes its members as advocates whose experience runs through state legislatures, the federal government, policy, advocacy and nonprofit management, along with powerful personal experiences. Their job will be to guide the group’s strategy as it expands.
What an Advisory Council Signals
Organizations form advisory councils when they stop being a project and start being an institution. For Conservatives Concerned, which began as a pocket of Republican lawmakers in Montana and now works across the country, the new council is a statement about permanence. The group says it is grateful for the members’ commitment to advancing public safety solutions grounded in accountability, human dignity, and the responsible use of government power and stewardship, a phrase that captures how the network frames the issue. It is not primarily a moral argument made from outside conservatism. It is an argument made from inside it, about what a limited government should and should not be trusted to do.
The group has invited the public to read the full biographies of the council members on its website. The roster itself is best taken from the organization directly, and readers will find it there.
The case against the death penalty, in this telling, is a conservative case about the limits of government.
The Conservative Argument, in the Network’s Own Terms
Conservatives Concerned says it exists to educate conservatives about what it calls a failed death penalty system and to mobilize them to help end it, while supporting responses to violence that help survivors and loved ones heal, ensure accountability and promote redemption. Its members give several reasons for opposing capital punishment, and they tend to track familiar conservative themes. The first is cost. Capital cases are far more expensive than cases ending in life without parole, which strikes fiscal conservatives as a poor use of public money. The second is distrust of the state. Innocent people have been sentenced to death, and an institution that cannot guarantee it will get every case right should not hold an irreversible power. The third is the experience of victims’ families, who can spend decades in appeals instead of healing. The fourth is consistency, since many members who call themselves pro life see a contradiction in state sanctioned killing.
Supporters of capital punishment disagree, and their case deserves a fair hearing. They argue that the death penalty is a just response to the worst murders, that it honors the gravity of the victim’s loss, and that some crimes are so severe that no lesser punishment is proportionate. Many prosecutors and victims’ relatives hold that view with sincerity, and the debate inside the conservative movement is real. What Conservatives Concerned contends is that the system as it operates does not live up to the promises made on its behalf.
Conservatives Concerned argues
The system is costly and slow compared with life without parole.
The state cannot be trusted with an irreversible power.
Victims’ families are left waiting through decades of appeals.
Defenders of the death penalty argue
Some murders warrant the ultimate punishment.
It delivers justice and honors the victim.
Procedural safeguards, not abolition, are the answer to error.
From Montana to a National Network
The group traces its roots to Montana, where Republican legislators and party officials began calling for an end to capital punishment because of its cost. In March 2013, it launched nationally at the Conservative Political Action Conference under the name Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, and it is now organized under the shorter name Conservatives Concerned. Based in Brooklyn and housed within the nonprofit Equal Justice USA, it has built state chapters in Texas, Ohio, Louisiana, North Carolina, Nebraska, Washington, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, Kansas, Wyoming, Montana and Utah. Georgia and Florida chapters launched in 2017, Wyoming, Louisiana and Ohio in 2020, and Texas in 2023.
Its record has real victories and one prominent reversal. Nebraska’s legislature overrode a governor’s veto to abolish the death penalty in 2015, only for voters to restore it in a 2016 referendum. New Hampshire abolished capital punishment in 2019 after both chambers overrode a veto. Colorado followed in 2020, when Governor Jared Polis signed a repeal bill that passed the Senate with help from three Republican votes. The network also credits conservatives with helping end the death penalty in Virginia, and Republican lawmakers have sponsored repeal legislation in Ohio, Wyoming, Pennsylvania and Utah. Several of those efforts were driven by Republican votes, which is the point the group keeps making.
The Staff Behind the Network
The organization is led by Executive Director Demetrius Minor. Nan Tolson serves as Deputy Director and Texas State Director, Nicholas Cote as Director of Operations and Development, Brett Farley as Oklahoma State Director, and Lauren Luxenburg as Georgia State Director. The new Advisory Council sits alongside that staff as an outside source of strategy and experience.
Why the Timing Matters
The council arrives in a year when executions have surged in one of the country’s most conservative states. Florida put William Reaves Jr., a 77 year old Army veteran, to death on October 20, the state’s eighteenth execution of 2026. It carried out 19 in 2025, the most in a single year since capital punishment resumed in 1976, and it has two more men scheduled for November 5 and November 19, either of which would tie or break that record. Florida accounts for more than half of the 32 executions in the United States this year. The pace has produced uncomfortable questions on the right about whether a program run this fast can claim to be careful, and some of those questions have been raised in public by conservative figures who are not usually critics of law enforcement.
Conservatives Concerned has been part of that conversation, and its argument about caution with state power applies directly to a state signing warrants at this tempo. Whether the new council changes the political math is an open question. What it does give a movement that has long been small and spread across many states is a standing body of experienced advisers.
A Milestone, With a Mission Attached
In announcing the council, the organization said the milestone was made possible by the support of conservatives who believe in its mission, and that further contributions will help it educate more conservatives about the flaws and failures of capital punishment, mobilize its network around more effective responses to violence, and make more inroads in states ripe for repeal. It called the council the start of a next chapter.
- 2009Republican lawmakers in Montana voice concerns about capital punishment.
- March 2013The network launches nationally at CPAC.
- 2019 and 2020New Hampshire and Colorado abolish the death penalty.
- 2023The Texas chapter launches.
- October 2026The inaugural Advisory Council for 2026 to 2028 is announced.
The next two years will show what the council is for. If it widens the circle of conservatives willing to say out loud that the death penalty is a poor fit for a movement built on skepticism of government, it will have done what the founders hoped. If it does not, the executions will go on at a record pace, and the argument will keep being made, for now, mostly from the margins of the right.
