Please note that the date of this event was previously listed as January 30 but will now be held on February 11 at 6pm.
Join us at Kepler’s to hear Dr. Elizabeth Vartkessian discuss The Deserving: What the Lives of the Condemned Reveal about American Justice.
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Dear Reader,
When Dr. Elizabeth Vartkessian’s new book The Deserving was announced, I immediately wanted to bring her to Kepler’s for This Is Now.
We’re seeing today a demonization of “the other” with way too many historical precedents. The human desire to punish wrongdoers will always be there, ready to be exploited. Compassion flees. It’s an act of sanity to reel it back into our reality.
That’s way more complicated when “the other” has done something horrible—even downright evil. Run a stop sign and almost hit me? I can reflect that I did that once and get over it. Murder my sister? Wreak unthinkable damage on a child? I want you to suffer. I may want you dead.
That’s the ground Dr. Vartkessian and her colleagues tread. Mitigation specialists spend hours, months, sitting with perpetrators of exactly those crimes. The goal: bringing to judge and jury a complete picture of the life experience of the accused. Evil doesn’t spring unbidden. Mitigators track it to its wellspring.
Child neglect, hunger, substandard education, poverty. We all know the connection between these lacks and crime. Elizabeth Vartkessian challenges us to take that to its next rational step: the worst of crimes can emerge from the same elements. Can we exercise the same compassion on the rapist as on the shoplifter? Can we force ourselves to look beyond punishment to fixing the injustices that birth the guilty?
It’s a big ask. For those closest to the victims, it may be an impossible, heartless ask. But the collective, our American society, can only benefit from repairing our most dangerous ruptures. How do we move from the understandable, completely human cry for punishment—for revenge—to preventing the next, and the next, and the next horrendous crime?
Come find out with me as Kepler’s welcomes Dr. Vartkessian. As always, your questions will be part of our conversation. Even with so much happening around us, this is a critical one.
About the Book
As a mitigator hired by criminal defense lawyers in the hope of reducing the severity of their clients’ punishments, Dr. Vartkessian has spent hundreds of hours per case talking to mothers, siblings, teachers, and neighbors of a defendant, situating their crimes into context. As a detective of the accused person’s life, she learns details about familial behaviors and relationship patterns, community settings—and what she finds, every single time, is that when personal or generational trauma enters the body, it finds its way out eventually.
In this fascinating book packed with the moving, real-life stories of the clients she has worked with over the past twenty years, The Deserving describes the vital role a mitigator plays in developing an understanding of how her clients arrived at the point in their life where they committed their crime. We learn that very few people (if any) are born evil, but that the forces that shape us as we grow up can lead to the most tragic of outcomes.
Dr. Vartkessian will be in conversation with journalist Angie Coiro.
About the Speaker
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 from the University of Oxford, an MS in Comparative Social Policy from Oxford, and BAs 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.
We are delighted to be joined by founding member and Co-Director of Uncuffed, Greg Eskridge. He will speak about the work Uncuffed is doing to empower people in prison to tell their own stories.
COVID SAFETY PROTOCOLS: We strongly encourage attendees to wear masks at our events, although they will NOT be required. We will have masks available for attendees who want them. Do NOT attend the event if you, or any member of your family, have any respiratory symptoms (e.g. cough, runny nose, and/or sore throat), or have had a significant exposure to someone who has tested positive for COVID-19.
ACCESSIBILITY: We never want cost to be a barrier to admission for our community. Please email events [at] keplers [dot] org if you would like to attend this event but cannot afford a ticket. To request an accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) for this event, please email events [at] keplers [dot] org at least one week prior to the event.