Elizabeth Vartkessian
AUTHOR, MITIGATION SPECIALIST, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
OF ADVANCING REAL CHANGE
THE DESERVING
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, The Deserving is required reading for a dangerous new era of rollbacks. Vartkessian offers a compelling, hope-filled vision of true rehabilitation replacing retribution.
PRAISE FOR THE DESERVING
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 & 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.
MAURICE CHAMMAH,
Author of Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty
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...
JOHN BESSLER,
Author of The Death Penalty's Denial of Fundamental Human Rights
ABOUT ELIZABETH
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 the University of Oxford, and BAs in philosophy and political science from the 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.
