The Columbus Free Press is proud to announce the recipient of our 2024 "Libby" award for Lifetime Achievement in Community Activism -- Abe Bonowitz. The Free Press honors community activists annually with a "Libby" Award, named for a former Free Press editor, Libby Gregory, who lost her life in 1991 in an airplane accident. 

The Awards event will happen during the Free Press Second Saturday Salon on the evening of December 14, the location to be announced.

Abraham Bonowitz is Executive Director of DeathPenaltyAction.org, the leading national single-issue anti-death penalty organization in the United States. While he was an active member of Columbus' Amnesty International Group #87 and the student group at OSU in the late 1980s, he tried to convince Amnesty people that capital punishment was a necessary tool and worked just fine. Instead, he became convinced that capital punishment is a public policy failure on moral, economic, social and faith-based grounds. It is his experience, as a former supporter of executions, that informs his various approaches toward opposing and ending the practice.

Abe has now been working to oppose executions and end the death penalty for more than 35 years. He was a core member of teams that successfully implemented campaigns to legislatively repeal the death penalty in New Jersey, New Mexico, Illinois, Maryland and Delaware, and was also involved in successful death penalty repeal campaigns in Connecticut, New Hampshire, Nebraska (reinstated via referendum), Colorado, Virginia, and Washington State.

As a leader and an organizer in efforts to oppose state executions across the country, and federal executions under Presidents (GW) Bush and Trump, Abe has been instrumental in the creation of new state anti-death penalty groups in Florida, Idaho, Utah and South Carolina. 

In Ohio, he worked with Ohioans to Stop Executions and the broader Ohio Alliance for the Mental Illness Exemption to help pass landmark legislation that prohibits the execution of convicted murderers who were severely mentally ill at the time of their crimes. On behalf of Melissa Lucio and her family, Abe led a campaign which helped create enough public pressure to stop Lucio's execution in Texas in 2022, and he eagerly awaits final legal efforts which should result in her exoneration and freedom.

Bonowitz has served on the boards of directors of Amnesty International USA, Journey of Hope...From Violence to Healing, and the now-defunct National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. In 2017 he co-founded Death Penalty Action, the leading national, secular anti-death penalty protest organization in the United States. He and his team organize protests opposing every execution in the United States, for the guilty and the innocent.

Death Penalty Action leads a coalition of nearly 500 organizations supporting the Federal Death Penalty Prohibition Act (Durbin/Pressley) and a growing coalition of more than 300 organizations urging President Biden to commute all of the federal and military death sentences before he leaves office in January 2025. Bonowitz is also co-founder of L'chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty.

Abe has been arrested while protesting executions more than ten times. Bonowitz v. United States arose from his 1997 arrest at the US (un)Supreme Court and, unfortunately, remains the prevailing case law cited by the government when prosecuting individuals arrested for nonviolent civil resistance on the grounds of the US unSupreme Court. Bonowitz also takes it as a personal point of pride that the chain across the driveway of the Ohio Governor's Mansion was replaced with actual gates following his arrest with five others while seeking to halt the 1999 execution of Wilford Berry.

Abe grew up in Bexley, is a 1984 graduate of Bexley High School and Fort Hayes Career Center, and a 1986 graduate of the now-defunct Ohio Institute of Photography. In 1994 he left Ohio to serve as the assistant to the founding executive director of the Cesar E. Chavez Foundation. For a year, he was the acting executive director of the Chavez Foundation, working to preserve and uphold the legacy of organizing and nonviolence exhibited via the leadership of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, the co-founders of the United Farm Workers of America, AFL-CIO.

After residency in California, Texas, Florida, New Jersey and Maryland, he returned to Ohio in 2016 and lives in Bexley with his wife of nearly 20 years (Beth Wood teaches at Columbus City Schools), where they enjoy being empty nesters as they admire their well-launched child, a proud apprenticing member of Ironworkers 172.

Take action to oppose all executions in the United States and urge President Biden to commute all of the federal and military death sentences before he leaves office at DeathPenaltyAction.org.