In the August 2026 episode of 12:01: The Death Penalty in Context, DPI Racial Justice Storyteller Taylor Bonner speaks with Rafiah Muhammad-McCormick (pictured left), Director of Community Outreach for Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (TADP) and founder of Rodney’s Village, a violence prevention non-profit. A murder victim’s family member and community advocate, Ms. Muhammad-McCormick discusses how the loss of her son shaped her approach to violence prevention and death penalty advocacy, the importance of community accountability, and the resources victims and their families need to heal after violence.
They begin their conversation by discussing young people sentenced to death in Tennessee. Between 1974 and 2012, Tennessee sentenced 135 people between the ages of 18 and 28 to death. Ms. Muhammad-McCormick challenges the idea that committing an “adult crime” transforms a young person into an adult, emphasizing that many young defendants have not yet fully developed and may have experienced significant trauma and instability. She points to Christa Pike, who was 18 at the time of her crime and experienced sexual abuse as a child. Ms. Muhammad-McCormick contrasts Ms. Pike’s experience with recent efforts in Tennessee to authorize the death penalty for child rape, questioning a system that may treat child rape as sufficiently serious to warrant death for the perpetrator, while preparing to execute someone who herself survived child rape.
For Ms. Muhammad-McCormick, accountability also requires communities to examine the conditions that precede violence. She points to housing instability, untreated trauma, parents working multiple jobs, and limited resources for young people, arguing that society must consider its own role before determining that a young person is irredeemable. This focus on community responsibility became central to Rodney’s Village, the nonprofit she founded after her son Rodney was killed in July 2020. Drawing on more than 25 years working in automotive manufacturing and root-cause analysis, she began asking not simply why her son’s murder occurred, but what conditions made it possible.
Ms. Muhammad-McCormick then turns to discuss her work supporting survivors of violence. In 2024, advocates helped expand Tennessee’s victim compensation system, including broadening eligibility for funeral-expense reimbursement and extending the period for reporting a crime to law enforcement from 48 hours to two weeks. Through Rodney’s Village, TADP, and Mothers Over Murder, she has also helped educate survivors about accessing compensation and created opportunities for people who have experienced harm and people who have caused harm to identify what communities need to prevent future violence. Ms. Muhammad-McCormick is a leader of the “Healed People Heal People Campaign” in Tennessee, explaining that “hurt spreads, violence spreads, but healing spreads too.”
The conversation then shifts to address Tennessee’s felony murder laws and their disproportionate impact on Black youth, as well as Ms. Muhammad-McCormick’s advocacy surrounding the execution of Tony Carruthers. She emphasizes that victims’ families are not uniform in their views of capital punishment and rejects the assumption that executions necessarily provide healing or closure. Instead, she argues that resources should address the financial, emotional, housing, and employment consequences families experience after violent loss. “Every dollar invested in healing and prevention,” she says, strengthens “communities in ways that the death penalty never will be able to do.”
Ms. Muhammad-McCormick concludes by asking listeners to recognize that survivors are “not one-dimensional.” “We can grieve deeply and still have mercy,” she says. “We can demand accountability and reject vengeance.” For her, preventing violence requires communities to invest in the support and opportunities for intervention before harm occurs. As she tells listeners, “Justice isn’t measured only by what we punish. It’s measured by what we restore.”
