We provide professional services to aid attorneys and ensure holistic representation of their clients, including comprehensive pre-plea and pre-sentence memoranda, reports to support bail applications, and dismissal motions for state and federal cases; and we assist with referrals to community-based treatment programs for judicial diversion and mental health courts. A mitigation specialist is an indispensable member of the defense team throughout all capital proceedings. Mitigation specialists possess information-gathering skills and training that most lawyers simply do not have. They have the time and ability to elicit sensitive, embarrassing and often humiliating evidence (e.g., family sexual abuse) that the defendant may never have disclosed.

Perhaps most critically, having a qualified mitigation specialist assigned to every capital case as an integral part of the defense team ensures that the presentation to be made at the penalty phase is integrated into the overall preparation of the case rather than being hurriedly thrown together by defense counsel still in shock at the guilty verdict. The mitigation specialist compiles a comprehensive and well-document psycho-social history of the client based on an exhaustive investigation; analyzes the significance of the information in terms of impact on development, including effect on personality and behavior; finds mitigating themes in the client’s life history; identifies the need for expert assistance; assists in locating appropriate experts; provides social history information to experts to enable them to conduct competent and reliable evaluations; and works with the defense team and experts to develop a comprehensive and cohesive case in mitigation.

The mitigation specialist often plays an important role as well in maintaining close contact with the client and his family while the case is pending. The rapport developed in this process can be the key to persuading a client to accept a plea to a sentence less than death.

For all of these reasons the use of mitigation specialists has become “part of the existing ‘standard of care’” in capital cases, ensuring “high quality investigation and preparation of the penalty phase.”