From The Marshall Project: ​“The Mercy Workers” —The Unique Role of Mitigation Specialists in Death Penalty Cases

During the sen­tenc­ing phase of cap­i­tal cas­es, sym­pa­thet­ic evi­dence about the life of the defen­dant is typ­i­cal­ly pre­sent­ed to jurors, who then must decide whether such mit­i­gat­ing fac­tors mer­it spar­ing his or her life. Mitigation spe­cial­ists play a cru­cial role in col­lect­ing such evi­dence. They doc­u­ment ​“the trau­mas, pol­i­cy fail­ures, fam­i­ly dynam­ics and indi­vid­ual choic­es that shape the lives of peo­ple who kill.” According to an arti­cle from The Marshall Project, there are few­er than 1,000 mit­i­ga­tions spe­cial­ists nation­wide, yet they’ve ​“helped dri­ve down death sen­tences from more than 300 annu­al­ly in the mid-1990s to few­er than 30 in recent years.” 

“My job is to help peo­ple look at my client as a human being,” Elizabeth Vartkessian, a lead­ing mit­i­ga­tion spe­cial­ist said, ​“The sys­tem shouldn’t even require it, because it shouldn’t be a question.”

The arti­cle by Maurice Chammah describes the chal­lenges mit­i­ga­tion spe­cial­ists face to human­ize their clients. They ​“col­lect thou­sands of pages of records from hos­pi­tals, schools, jails and courts, and inter­view dozens of peo­ple in each case. There are no short­cuts to sen­si­tive rev­e­la­tions of fam­i­ly secrets: A cru­cial sto­ry of child­hood sex­u­al abuse or a severe brain injury might not appear until the fifth vis­it with an estranged cousin who hap­pened to wit­ness a key event decades before.”

Sara Baldwin (pic­tured), anoth­er promi­nent spe­cial­ist, described her role as a ​“wit­ness who knows and under­stands, with­out con­demn­ing,” and the process as eval­u­at­ing the killer ​“through a more mer­ci­ful lens.” She con­tin­ued, ​“The hor­ri­ble thing to see is the crime. We’re say­ing, ​‘Please, please, look past that, there’s a per­son here, and there’s more to it than you think.’”

Chammah con­cludes that ​“mit­i­ga­tion spe­cial­ists force us to ask: When we look at the face of some­one who has done great wrong, and stare into the void of what we don’t know, do we see a mon­ster or a soul in torment?”