Dr Elizabeth Vartkessian’s clients are guilty of the most heinous crimes. But as Dr Vartkessian tells it, everyone has someone who loves them. Even people who have committed murder.
As a mitigator hired by criminal defence lawyers in the hope of reducing the severity of their clients’ punishments, Dr Vartkessian has spent hundreds of hours per case talking to mothers, siblings, teachers, and neighbours of a defendant, situating their crimes into context. As a detective of the accused person’s life, she learns details about familial behaviours and relationship patterns, community settings – and what she finds, every single time, is that when personal or generational trauma enters the body, it finds its way out eventually.
In this fascinating book, packed with the moving, real-life stories of the clients she has worked with over the past 20 years, The Deserving describes the vital role a mitigator plays in developing an understanding of how her clients arrived at the point in their life where they committed their crime. We learn that very few people (if any) are born evil, but that the forces that shape us as we grow up can lead to the most tragic of outcomes.
”In stories shaped by history, childhood harm, and pain passed down across generations, Vartkessian shows how people once full of promise can be pulled into cycles of violence and loss. The Deserving asks a simple, urgent question: will we wait for prison to respond to suffering, or will we care for our children before the hurt takes root? Real justice begins with listening. This book shows us what that looks like” – Calvin Duncan and Sophie Cull, co-authors of THE JAILHOUSE LAWYER
”Elizabeth Vartkessian writes about death row like a detective crossed with a philosopher, propelling us one revelation at a time into a richer understanding of how violence begets violence. So many books and movies try to tell us why people harm and kill each other. We’re always flashing back to the villain’s childhood. But too often we give up and shrug off some people as monsters. Vartkessian offers a new, courageous vision for a society with less violence and more mercy, through an honest reckoning with how we fail the least among us” – Maurice Chammah, author of LET THE LORD SORT THEM: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE DEATH PENALTY
”In The Deserving, Elizabeth Vartkessian writes with clarity and compassion about the condemned – about their lives on American death rows, about the traumatic lives they led before landing there, and about capital litigation and the mysterious, little-known world of the “mitigation specialist”. From her first visit to Texas’s death row at age 23 to becoming a leader in her field, she pulls back the curtain on capital punishment and cruelty, American execution chambers, and the country’s criminal and juvenile justice systems” – Professor John Bessler, author of THE DEATH PENALTY’S DENIAL OF FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN RIGHTS
Mitigation specialist Elizabeth Vartkessian has been investigating the life histories of those facing the most severe penalties possible in the United States since 2004. She holds a Ph.D. in Law from the University of Oxford, an M.S. in Comparative Social Policy from Oxford, and B.A.s in Philosophy and Political Science from the George Washington University, where she was a Presidential Scholar. In 2015 she was awarded the J.M.K. Innovation Prize for her efforts to bring mitigation to all areas of the criminal justice process. In 2018, the City Council of Baltimore passed a resolution praising her efforts to bring human dignity into the justice system. After launching a successful private practice, Vartkessian and several colleagues created Advancing Real Change, Inc., a national non-profit dedicated to conducting life history investigations in criminal cases. She has spoken widely and written on the criminal legal system in the Baltimore Sun and numerous peer-reviewed journals and law reviews. She lives in Baltimore.
