Let Them Get Their Voices Out: The Death Row 10, Radical Abolitionists, and the Anti–Death Penalty Movement in Illinois (1996–2011)

In late 1990s Illinois, a group of African American prisoners calling themselves the Death Row 10 (DR10) forged a partnership with radical anti–death penalty activists in Chicago to help win their release and reinvigorate a movement to abolish capital punishment. Led by the Campaign to End the Death Penalty (CEDP), a multiracial yet largely white middle-class offshoot of the International Socialist Organization (ISO),¹ this movement represented the latest in a long tradition of cooperation between radical activists and black prisoners extending back to the 1930s and earlier. Throughout the twentieth century, leftist organizations, including militant black nationalist groups, consistently joined prisoners' friends and families as the most stalwart allies of the convicted—particularly those living on death row—who otherwise struggled to elicit sympathy and support on the outside. That an alliance of men convicted of murder and radical leftists could forge a multiracial coalition—a modern-day Popular Front—and help win several victories between 1996 and 2011 reveals a vital history of resistance and accomplishment among two of the most marginalized groups in the United States.

Yet the movement's decision to embrace the politics of innocence threatened to undermine its radical critique of capital punishment. While the CEDP maintained a principled opposition to the death penalty in all cases, the influence of the DR10 conditioned the movement to foreground innocence as a justification for abolition and relegate other frames to the background. The DR10 existed, after all, to highlight its members' collective claims to innocence and win their release from prison. Abolishing the death penalty came second. In contrast, leftists and other anti–death penalty radicals struggled to fight along all fronts at once. They took on high-profile cases only with great caution, lest immediate concerns distract them from the ultimate goal of complete abolition. When the DR10 reached out to the CEDP in the late 1990s, however, the political opportunity structure around issues of capital punishment in the United States had begun to shift. Scientific advances in the use of DNA evidence and the emergence of a contemporary "innocence revolution" offered an irresistible opportunity for radical abolitionists to rally around a certain subset of death row prisoners—the wrongfully convicted.² In concert with the DR10, the CEDP hoped to channel widespread fear of executing the innocent toward eschewing reform and abolishing capital punishment altogether. While their emerging coalition fought to erode popular support for capital punishment in Illinois, their decision to foreground wrongful convictions blunted radical arguments against state-sanctioned killing.

This article recovers the history of a distinctive alliance and analyzes its special role in the anti–death penalty movement. Immediately before the DR10 and the CEDP forged an alliance in 1998, several informed observers concluded there was no viable Left in American politics, no radical fringe in the anti–death penalty movement, and no way for death row occupants to actively participate in any mass movement. In 1992, historian John Patrick Diggins described the dawning decade as "a curious time when the Left in the United States has no political significance" or "power," only "educational influence" and "authority to shape the minds of the young."³ In an otherwise biting review of Diggins's The Rise and Fall of the American Left, historian Maurice Isserman did not dispute his colleague's diagnosis but predicted "the collapse of international Communism and the end of the cold war may well prove to be the prelude to another, more enduring, rise of the American left."⁴ In 1996, sociologist Herbert H. Haines found a similar dearth of radical involvement in the anti–death penalty movement, citing a member of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP) who told him, "What this movement needs—and has had [at] various times, but what it desperately needs now—is the radical fringe!"⁵ Haines found no evidence of death row prisoners actively participating in the movement either, writing, "The most direct beneficiaries of anti-death penalty work, death-sentenced inmates, are utterly...