Susannah Sheffer is a licensed clinical mental health counselor and a writer and researcher focusing on the impact of the death penalty. Her 2013 book Fighting for Their Lives: Inside the Experience of Capital Defense Attorneys (Vanderbilt University Press) is based on in-depth interviews with 20 attorneys who had lost at least one client to execution. With the organization Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights, Susannah directed the “No Silence, No Shame” project, through which she produced the 2006 report Creating More Victims: How Executions Hurt the Families Left Behind and convened the first public remembrance ceremony and press conference by family members of executed persons. More recently, Susannah wrote the Texas After Violence Project’s 2019 report Nobody To Talk To: Barriers to Mental Health Treatment for Family Members of Individuals Sentenced to Death or Executed. She has spoken about these issues in a variety of venues, including an Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights event at the United Nations in 2016.
