Collections : [National Death Penalty Archive]

National Death Penalty Archive

National Death Penalty Archive

Researchers, writers, activists, and records on capital punishment in the United States.
The National Death Penalty Archive (NDPA) is a partnership between the University at Albany Libraries and the Capital Punishment Research Initiative (CPRI) at the University's School of Criminal Justice. In 1999, researchers at the School of Criminal Justice formally established the CPRI. Its overarching goals were research and education -- initiate capital punishment research activities, facilitate collaboration among researchers, and make findings and information available to legal and criminal justice policymakers, practitioners, and the public. One of the original goals of the CPRI was to establish and maintain a collection of archival materials documenting the important history of capital punishment, and to provide resources for historical scholarship. This growing collection of archival materials is housed in the M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, which is located in the University's state of the art Science Library. Open since 1999, the new archival repository includes climate-controlled storage for more than 25,000 cubic feet. The following collections have been acquired for the NDPA through the collaborative efforts of the CPRI and the University Libraries; work is continuing to build this important link to the history of capital punishment in the United States.

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Collection
For more than three decades, Abraham J. Bonowitz has worked to educate the public about human rights problems, in particular the death penalty and the need for alternatives to the death penalty. During this time he served in numerous director, consultant, managerial, and activist roles with leading advocacy and death penalty abolitionist organizations.
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Series 1 contains documents relating to the internal procedures and finances of Murder Victims' Families for reconciliation. While there are a few documents that provide evidence of how the organization was set up, the majority of documents focus on hiring, day to day finances, and committee meetings. There are also materials related to strategic planning and the creation of by-laws and organizational procedure. Although the series contains materials from 1977 to 2005, the bulk of the material is from 1996 to 2004. Contained in this series are meeting agendas, meeting minutes, meeting summaries, correspondence, annual reports, ballots, evaluation forms, applications, newsletters, fliers, budgets, financial reports, manuals, by-laws, pamphlets, drafts, notes, reports, contracts, forms, resumes, proofs, floppy disks, and cassettes.

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This series contains information on the daily, monthly, and yearly operational duties of the Southern Coalition on Jails and Prisons. There is a general correspondence file containing information about the day-to-day operations of the Coalition, a specific file dedicated to correspondence with the Law Offices of Woods and Woods, and material from the various boards of directors within the Coalition (including meeting minutes). There are also documents related to updates made to the Coalition's by-laws in the late 1980s.

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Online
This collection documents the seventeen-year period (1974-1991) concerning the Florida capital punishment case of Alvin Ford. The collection primarily contains the court records and research material of Ford's attorney, Laurin A. Wollan, Jr., as well as other members of the Ford defense team who began work on the case in 1981. The legal records include official court proceedings from the initial trial in 1974, appeals, attempts at clemency, and several cases by Ford against the Florida Department of Corrections. Other legal records include psychological reports, background reports, biographies of Ford, as well as his prison and medical records.
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Online
Bill Pelke is a leader in the national death penalty abolition movement. This collection documents Bill Pelke's involvement with Journey of Hope...from Violence to Healing, Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation (MVFR), National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP), Amnesty International, and other organizations committed to ending capital punishment in the United States.
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Biographical, 1950-1998 0.17 cubic ft.

This series contains two large bibliographies of Ernest van den Haag's writings. The first bibliography covers his works from 1950-1982. The second includes his writings up to 1998. These bibliographies organize his writings alphabetically by topic and each publication includes an assigned number. These numbers do not reflect a strict, but rather general chronological order (i.e. number one was published in 1968 while number two was published in 1954). The numbering system probably reflects the order in which the articles were begun. Some were published quickly while others took longer. This series also contains van den Haag's curriculum vitae from 1973-1998 as well as short biographies from 1973-1989.