Contact Your Legislator

Please check back for specific campaigns and opportunities to email your legislators about specific death penalty reforms. 

Until then, the time is always right to make your voice heard, and hand-written letters are a powerful way to ask legislators to make the changes necessary to address this public policy failure. You can write to your state legislator in Tennessee to ask for death penalty repeal. If you don’t know who your legislators are, go to http://www.capitol.tn.gov/ and enter your address in the bottom right corner. Please refer to the sample letter below as a model for your own letter.

If you would like to hold a letter-writing campaign at your community of faith, university, high school or civic club, TCPR can help! Please contact us if  you would like assistance and advice with this.

Sample Letter for State Legislators on Repeal

Today’s date
Representative or Senator (your representative/senator’s name here)
Address
City, TN   Zip

Dear Representative (or Dear Senator) ___________,

As your constituent, I am deeply concerned about the use of the death penalty system in Tennessee. It is ineffective, inefficient, costly to taxpayers, does not make us safer, and continues to risk executing an innocent person.

Because of the necessarily long and complicated legal process, the system is hard on murder victims’ family members while alternative sentences like life without parole would at least provide them with legal finality more swiftly.

For all these reasons, I believe Tennessee should repeal the death penalty and use the savings to support victims’ families.

I would like to hear from you about whether you would support death penalty repeal legislation in Tennessee.

Thank you for your service to Tennessee.

Sincerely,

(Signature here)

Name
Address