- Illinois could become the first state to restore the right to vote to people while they serve felony sentences.
- Oregon tried to pass a similar bill this year, but it failed.
- “Voting plays an important role in the policies that govern the spaces in which so many condemned people exist,” said Renaldo Hudson, convicted murderer and now a suffrage advocate.
At 19, addicted and functionally illiterate, Renaldo Hudson went to prison in 1983 to await trial in the murder of a 71-year-old man whom he stabbed about 60 times before setting his Chicago apartment on fire.
Staring at the death sentence for the murder of Folke Peterson, teenagers’ minds drifted away from Americans’ right to vote.
