The Deserving: Understanding American Justice Through the Lives of the Condemned

A groundbreaking new take on the American justice system from one of its unknown revolutionaries, 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. 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.

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.