Yarbrough garnered her biggest accolades for her House sponsorship of the ban on executions in Illinois, culminating in the passage of the legislation in January 2011.
Cook County Clerk Karen A. Yarbrough speaks after conducting the first official wedding ceremony of the year marrying Daniel Ferguson and Mandy Fila of Brookfield on Tuesday, Jan. 3, 2023, at the Clerk’s Office. Cook County Clerk Karen Yarbrough, a fixture in state and local Democratic Party politics who successfully championed legislation to ban the death penalty in Illinois, died Sunday. She was 73.
Yarbrough was a native of Washington D.C. Her family came to Maywood in the early 1960s. She studied business management at Chicago State University and received her masters in Inner City Studies from Northeastern Illinois University. Yarbrough and Moore often clashed. She lost to him in a 2002 race for Proviso Township Democratic Committeeman, but beat him four years later. When Moore retired as recorder, Yarbrough succeeded him in the county post and left the House position she held for more than a decade.
The measure quickly passed the Senate, and Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn signed the bill in a private ceremony in his Capitol office with Yarbrough and then-Sen. Kwame Raoul, now the attorney general, looking on with other supporters. For years, reformers pushed for the recorder’s office, which oversees land transactions, to be combined with the clerk’s office, which oversees suburban voting and records like birth certificates, and voters approved the merger in 2016.Former Cook County Commissioner Ed Moody, then a close Madigan associate who now is expected to testify in the ex-speaker’s upcoming federal corruption trial, was appointed as interim recorder until the merger was complete.
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