The Deserving: What the Lives of the Condemned Reveal About American Justice

We need the work that is mitigation. It is mercy work.

For readers of Just Mercy and The New Jim Crow, a groundbreaking new take on the American justice system from one of its unknown "mercy workers," offering a powerful new vision of responsibility, punishment, and repair.

"The first book I'm aware of to pull back the curtain on a life-saving field most have never heard of: mitigation." --Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking, from the foreword

Elizabeth Vartkessian works with criminal defense teams as a mitigation specialist or "mercy worker." Her job is not to prove defendants' innocence, for they are often guilty, but rather to collect information that might make sense of their behavior. She spends hundreds of hours situating their crimes in context by investigating their histories and communities, talking to their parents, siblings, teachers, and neighbors.

This context changes everything; it rehumanizes. Vartkessian has spent decades fighting for juries to see it. Here she offers both a window into the groundbreaking work that is mitigation and a moving account of the individuals whose lives she has defended.

She also lays out a possible future. Vartkessian's experience shows clearly that violence is an expression of compounded trauma. In case after case, she turns up inflection points where support--adequate housing or childcare, the proper diagnosis or treatment--would have redirected a defendant's path away from that violence. What if the values of mitigation--curiosity, context, and mercy--became the values of our criminal justice system? We might stop crime before it happens.

In an era of dangerous rollbacks and record-high executions, The Deserving is an inspiring argument for true rehabilitation replacing retribution.