The Deserving - Elizabeth Varketssian in conversation with Ben Miller

Join us in-store for both a challenging and investigative evening discourse regarding incarceration on Wednesday, September 30th at 6:00PM as Weller's hosts mitigation specialist, Elizabeth Vartkessian in conversation with Utah's own public defender, Ben Miller!

**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.

**Ben Miller** is an Assistant Federal Public Defender in the Capital Habeas Unit of the Federal Public Defender for the District of Arizona. He has spent the bulk of his legal career as a public defender, having been the deputy chief of the Utah Indigent Appellate Defense Division, and an assistant public defender with the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia and the Maryland Office of the Public Defender. He also has policy experience when he worked as a principal with The Wren Collective, where he provided research, legislative, and communications support to elected officials, grassroots organizers, and public figures seeking to reform the criminal legal system.

His article, Planning Brady's Comeback: Public Defenders Are Needed as Judges to Lead the Restoration of Brady's Lost Promise, was published in the *American Criminal Law Review*. Ben has authored or co-authored op-eds that have appeared in the *Utah Bar Journal*, *The Salt Lake Tribune*, *Deseret News*, *Utah News Dispatch, Washington Post*, *USA Today*, *The Appeal*, *Slate*, and *Politico*, among other publications.

He has prior teaching experience as an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland School of Law, University of Baltimore School of Law, and American University Washington College of Law.

***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.