Illinois Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty records, Bulk, 1976-2011

The Illinois Coalition Against the Death Penalty, later renamed the Illinois Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, was founded by Mary Alice Rankin and other activists in 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Gregg v. Georgia, reinstated the death penalty after a four-year hiatus. Rankin, a longtime Republican and social justice advocate, believed the death penalty to be unfair, arbitrary, and immoral, and she and her colleagues embarked on a campaign to end it.

Under Rankin's leadership and after her death in 1990, the ICADP adopted several tactics in its campaign. Its ultimate goal was to end capital punishment, but when the prospects for outright abolition seemed poor, the ICADP lobbied lawmakers to support measures to make the death penalty more difficult to implement. One such effort, the Illinois Death Penalty Moratorium Project of the late 1990s and early 2000s, urged lawmakers to postpone all executions so that a study could be conducted on the application of the death penalty. The ICADP also focused on changing people's minds about capital punishment. It engaged in prayer vigils at executions, it put on public demonstrations, benefit concerts, and special talks, and it allied itself with other local and national organizations, such as the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, Amnesty International, and the American Civil Liberties Union.

The ICADP enlisted prisoners and former prisoners on death row in its struggle against capital punishment. Volunteers from the organization visited prisoners and served as their advocates, often relaying complaints prisoners might have about what they said was unfair treatment. The ICADP also worked with such organizations as the Medill Innocence Project at Northwestern University, and it recruited former prisoners exonerated after conviction to speak publicly about their experiences. The coalition enjoyed its most noticeable success in the 2000s. Governor George Ryan issued a moratorium in 2000 on all executions in the state, citing what he considered the embarrassingly high number of false or otherwise suspect convictions that resulted in death sentences. He appointed a commission to investigate the matter, and in 2002, the commission issued its report, which recommended several reforms to the system. A small majority of the commission even proposed abolishing capital punishment altogether. By 2003, when the legislature had failed to enact any of the proposed reforms, Ryan commuted to life imprisonment all those on death row and pardoned four prisoners he believed to be innocent. During the next eight years, the ICADP continued its campaign, and issued its own studies, or "Annual Reports," on the state of capital punishment in Illinois. In 2011, its efforts paid off when the legislature passed, and Governor Patrick Quinn signed into law, Senate Bill 3539, which abolished capital punishment.

Although pleased with the abolition bill's success, the ICADP did not disband. It reaffirmed its commitment to helping end capital punishment throughout the United States.

The collection contains materials generated by the Illinois Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. These include annual reports, correspondence, grant proposals, internal notes, memoranda, and minutes of meetings, and photographs. The collection includes items given to or collected and used by the ICADP. These include awards, clippings of newspaper articles, posters, and signs used at ICADP demonstrations. It also includes 25 CD-ROMs and DVDs, on which can be found digital photographs, audio recordings of legislative debates, a video recording of an anti-death penalty information meeting, and a small number of documents in Microsoft word or PDF formats.

The collection is divided into two series. The first, "General Office files," contains files that appear to have come from the papers of one or more of the ICADP's executive directors or active board members. It includes minutes of meetings, grant proposals, annual reports, and several files on topics that range from the ICADP's history, the services it provided prisoners on death row, its demonstrations and other projects, and its legislative advocacy that culminated in the abolition of Illinois's death penalty in 2011.

The second series is "Moratorium Project and Other Records." Many of these papers come from the files kept by the organization's treasurer, although the provenance of some items was difficult to determine. About one-third of the files in this series deals with the Illinois Death Penalty Moratorium Project, which was a short-lived organization that advocated for the imposition of a death penalty moratorium in the state. The remainder of the files covers topics such as notes from ICADP meetings, fundraising ideas and grant proposals, public statements and public speaking events, and anti-death penalty publications.

Access to one folder, Oversize Folder 354, has been restricted by the donor. No patron may access its contents before 2025.

This series contains several CD-ROMs and DVDs. Patrons must use the "use copies" and not the originals. These "use copies" might not be viewable on all media devices and the media devices necessary for viewing them might not be available. Please call ahead to verify their availability. Two DVD's, CD-6A and CD-17A, are corrupt files and no "use copy" exists.

Illinois Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty records,, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Names
  • Illinois Coalition Against the Death Penalty. -- Archives
  • Illinois Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
  • Illinois Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. -- Archives
  • Lynch, Chris, President
• Subject
  • Capital punishment.
  • Chicago Community Organizations.
  • Human rights.
  • Politics and government.
  • Prison reformers.
  • Prisons.
  • Social justice.
• Geographic Coverage
  • Illinois--Chicago.
  • Illinois.