The Deserving - by Elizabeth Vartkessian (Hardcover)

About the Book

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.

Book Synopsis

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.

"We need the work that is mitigation. It is mercy work." -Sister Helen Prejean

Elizabeth Vartkessian works with criminal defense teams as a mitigation specialist. She isn't part of the Innocence Project; her clients are often legally guilty, and often of terrible crimes. Rather, her job is to spend hundreds of hours per case talking to the parents, siblings, teachers, and neighbors of a defendant, situating their crimes in context.

Founder and director of nonprofit mitigation team Advancing Real Change Inc., Vartkessian weaves powerful, gripping stories from her extraordinary career into an inspiring argument for dignity in American justice. Her unique experience has taught her that when personal or generational trauma enters the body, it finds its way out eventually, sometimes through violence. She contends that we cannot hold her clients solely responsible for their actions, nor can we continue to stomach harsh penalties that deny real justice to perpetrators and victims alike.

Amid the Trump administration's record-high executions and calls to expand the use of the death penalty after decades of progress, The Deserving is required reading for a dangerous new era of rollbacks. Vartkessian offers a compelling, hope-filled vision of true rehabilitation replacing retribution.

Review Quotes

"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: INTERNATIONAL LAW, STATE PRACTICE, AND THE EMERGING ABOLITIONIST NORM

About the Author

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 PhD in law and an MS in comparative social policy from Oxford, and BAs in philosophy and political science from George Washington University. She is the founder and director of Advancing Real Change Inc., a national nonprofit dedicated to conducting life history investigations in criminal cases. She lives in Baltimore.