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"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, for readers of No Visible Bruises and Just Mercy. Elizabeth Vartkessian works with criminal defense teams as a mitigation specialist. Few are aware of this work, yet it has the potential to transform our justice system for the better. Vartkessian isn't part of an Innocence Project; her clients are legally guilty, 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. She is a detective of accused people's lives, and her unique experience has taught her that when personal or generational trauma enters the body, it finds its way out eventually, often through violence. Once we honestly confront the stark realities of her clients' lives, she contends, we cannot hold them solely responsible for their actions, nor can we continue to stomach harsh, destructive penalties that deny real justice to perpetrators and victims alike. As founder and director of the Baltimore-based mitigation team Advancing Real Change, Inc., Vartkessian's life's work has been to discover how people-defendants, their families, loved ones, communities, attorneys, and jurors-end up where they are and how their trajectories could have been different. In this book, she weaves powerful, gripping stories from her extraordinary career into an inspiring argument for dignity in American justice. She reveals how our legal process is designed to ensure that crime continues, and to disown responsibility for its devastating outcomes. Amidst 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. Exactly a half a century after Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan declared the death penalty unconstitutional, Vartkessian picks up the torch to offer a compelling, hope-filled vision of how true rehabilitation, instead of retribution, would benefit us all"-- Provided by publisher.
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