Rev. Joseph B. Ingle speaking on

Rev. Joseph B. Ingle is the former director of the Southern Coalition on Jails and Prisons, founder of the Tennessee Committee against State Killing, and has served most recently the Executive Director of the Nashville-based Neighborhood Justice Center, an alternative conflict management center dedicated to restorative justice. 

Ingle is one of America’s most prominent opponents of the death penalty.  His work on death row, which began in 1973, has taken him into many different Southern prisons and death rows, and he has chronicled some of his experiences in his book, Last Rights:  Thirteen Fatal Encounters with the State’s Justice. The late Pulitzer-Prize winning author William Styron said of Ingle, “his service in the cause of the abolition of the death penalty—one of the purest of all moral missions—has been steadfast and sometimes heroic, and his work will deserve honor long after that day when the hand of the executioner is finally stilled.” 

Born in North Carolina, Ingle is a graduate of Union Theological Seminary in New York City and was a Harvard fellow in 1991.  He has twice been formally nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize—in 1988 and 1989.