Unfit to Die: Defending the Mentally Ill on Death Row

Unfit to Die: Defending the Mentally Ill on Death Row, by Dr Elizabeth Vartkessian, Capital Defence Expert, with an introduction from the Amicus Student Representatives of UCL, King's College London and Queen Mary, and Margot Ravenscroft, Amicus Director, on the death penalty work of hundreds of UK lawyers and students.

The work of the mitigation specialist is to analyse, develop and present evidence about a client’s life history. This is a way of humanizing and giving context to clients for the court and the jury. One of the crucial areas that mitigation specialists explore is mental health and intellectual disability, as it is unconstitutional to execute those with intellectual disability or insanity. Where a client may appear uncooperative and inconsistent could be hiding a person lacking memory and who has been through complex trauma as a child.

Elizabeth Vartkessian is the Executive Director of Advancing Real Change, Inc. (ARC, Inc.), a non-profit located in Baltimore, MD dedicated to conducting high-quality life history investigations in criminal cases to present mitigation to the court. She has worked as a mitigation specialist with defence teams since 2004 in trial and post-conviction cases in state and federal trials and has served as a faculty member in federal and state-wide trainings on the collection and effective presentation of mitigating evidence, as well as the standard of care required by the defense in death penalty and juvenile cases.

Amicus is a small legal charity that helps to provide representation for those facing execution in the US. Amicus was founded in 1992 in memory of Andrew Lee Jones, who was executed in Louisiana in 1991. We believe the death penalty is disproportionately imposed on the most vulnerable in society, violating their right to due process and the concept of equal justice before the law. We work to provide better access to justice for those who could not otherwise afford it.