The Mercy Workers

Melanie Garcia

The Marshall Project

Originally published 2 March 2023

Here are two excerpts:

Like her more famous anti-death penalty peers, such as Bryan Stevenson and Sister Helen Prejean, Baldwin argues the idea that people should be judged on more than their worst actions. But she also speaks in more spiritual terms about the value of unearthing her clients’ lives. “We look through a more merciful lens,” she told me, describing her role as that of a “witness who knows and understands, without condemning.” This work, she believes, can have a healing effect on the client, the people they hurt, and even society as a whole. “The horrible thing to see is the crime,” she said. “We’re saying, ‘Please, please, look past that, there’s a person here, and there’s more to it than you think.’”

The United States has inherited competing impulses: It’s “an eye for an eye,” but also “blessed are the merciful.” Some Americans believe that our criminal justice system — rife with excessively long sentences, appalling prison conditions and racial disparities — fails to make us safer. And yet, tell the story of a violent crime and a punishment that sounds insufficient, and you’re guaranteed to get eyerolls.

In the midst of that impasse, I’ve come to see mitigation specialists like Baldwin as ambassadors from a future where we think more richly about violence. For the last few decades, they have documented the traumas, policy failures, family dynamics and individual choices that shape the lives of people who kill. Leaders in the field say it’s impossible to accurately count mitigation specialists — there is no formal license — but there may be fewer than 1,000. They’ve actively avoided media attention, and yet the stories they uncover occasionally emerge in Hollywood scripts and Supreme Court opinions. Over three decades, mitigation specialists have helped drive down death sentences from more than 300 annually in the mid-1990s to fewer than 30 in recent years.

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The term “mitigation specialist” is often credited to Scharlette Holdman, a brash Southern human rights activist famous for her personal devotion to her clients. The so-called Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, tried to deed his cabin to her. (The federal government stopped him.) Her last client was accused 9/11 plotter Khalid Shaikh Mohammad. While working his case, Holdman converted to Islam and made a pilgrimage to Mecca. She died in 2017 and had a Muslim burial.

Holdman began a crusade to stop executions in Florida in the 1970s, during a unique moment of American ambivalence towards the punishment. After two centuries of hangings, firing squads and electrocutions, the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty in 1972. The court found that there was no logic guiding which prisoners were executed and which were spared.

The justices eventually let executions resume, but declared, in the 1976 case of Woodson v. North Carolina, that jurors must be able to look at prisoners as individuals and consider “compassionate or mitigating factors stemming from the diverse frailties of humankind.”

The article is here.

Henderson psychologist charged with murder can reopen practice

David Ferrara
Las Vegas Review-Journal
Originally posted July 14, 2017

A psychologist accused of killing his wife and staging her death as a suicide can start practicing medicine again in less than four months, the Nevada Board of Psychological Examiners decided Friday.

Suspected of abusing drugs and obtaining prescription drugs from patients, Gregory “Brent” Dennis, who prosecutors say poisoned attorney Susan Winters inside their Henderson home, also must undergo up to seven years of drug treatment, the seven-member panel ruled as they signed a settlement agreement that made no mention of the murder charge.

“It’s clear that the board members do not know what Brent Dennis was arrested for,” Keith Williams, a lawyer for the Winters family, told a Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter after the meeting. “We’re confident that they did not know what they were voting on today.”

Henderson police arrested Dennis on the murder charge in February.

The article is here.

The new neuroscience of genocide and mass murder

By Paul Rosenberg
Salon.org
Originally posted June 13, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

“Almost 20 years later I’m revisiting this issue in Paris,” Fried told Salon, saying several things motivated him, beginning with advances in neuroscience. “In neuroscience we’re moving more and more towards affective and social neuroscience; we are trying to address more complex social and psychological situations,” Fried said. “There has been some accumulation of knowledge in areas such as dehumanized perception, areas like theories of mind, the ability of other human beings to have a theory of mind of what is in another person’s mind—obviously this is completely obliterated in a situation of Syndrome E—and our understanding of neural mechanisms of empathy, a development which occurred over the last 10 years.” He added, “I think people are looking more at neuroscience correlations of interactions between people, so for instance the mirror neurons, the whole idea of mirror neurons, and what happens when you look at somebody else, what happens to your own brain.” He cited institutional developments as well—new organizations and journals supporting social cognitive research—all of which helped make the time ripe for a new look at Syndrome E.

But Fried also pointed to the ability to engage more robustly with criticisms across disciplinary fields. “I saw a renewed interest and ability to raise this question, because after I raised it initially there was really, some people were offended that I was giving a biological explanation to something that for them was just a bunch of scum shooting at innocent people, which it is, to some extent,” he admitted. Now, however, Fried sees a greater willingness to argue things through. “People are more attuned to the question of what is the relationship of neuroscience to the legal system, to the issue of responsibility—what is the definition of the responsible self—our sense of identity, our sense of responsibility. There are a lot of these types of questions which are raised with the development of neuroscience.”

The entire article is here.

Don't Execute Schizophrenic Killers

By Sally L. Satel
Bloomberg View
Originally posted December 1, 2014

Is someone who was diagnosed with schizophrenia years before committing murder sane enough to be sentenced to death?

The government thinks so in the case of Scott L. Panetti, 56, who will die on Wednesday by lethal injection in Texas unless Governor Rick Perry stays the execution.

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This is unjust. It is wrong to execute, even to punish, people who are so floridly psychotic when they commit their crimes that they are incapable of correcting the errors by logic or evidence.

Yet Texas, like many other states, considers a defendant sane as long as he knows, factually, that murder is wrong. Indeed, Panetti’s jury, which was instructed to apply this narrow standard, may have been legally correct to reject his insanity defense because he may have known that the murders were technically wrong.

The entire article is here.

Sanity of Psychologist’s Killer Is Again at Issue

By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
The New York Times
Published: January 2, 2014

The mental health of a man accused of killing a psychologist in her Upper East Side office was once again in question on Thursday, just as a judge in Manhattan was about to set a date for a new trial because the first one ended in a hung jury.

Lawyers for the man, David Tarloff, 45, said during a hearing on Thursday that a court-appointed psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital Center had found him unfit to stand trial during an examination in November.

The entire story is here.

Gruesome case videos became too much for top psychiatrist

Chris Cobb, Postmedia News | Originally published 11/11/13

Dr. John Bradford’s mental breakdown hit without warning less than half an hour after he watched Canadian Air Force colonel Russell Williams sexually assaulting two young women whom he would later kill.

During his long and distinguished career as a doctor and teacher, the internationally renowned forensic psychiatrist had become skilled at emotionally detaching himself from all manner of horrendous images.

He was relatively comfortable sitting across a table from the likes of notorious sex killers Paul Bernardo, Robert (Willie) Pickton and Williams.

And like all professionals in his line of work, Dr. Bradford was trained to focus on the killer, not the crime. His job is to get inside a killer’s mind, not to pass judgment on the severity or brutality of the killer’s actions.

The entire article is here.

Thanks to Gary Schoener for this article.

Psychiatrist, Also Victimized, Tells of Attack by Defendant

By Russ Buettner
The New York Times
Originally published March 12, 2013

At the murder trial of a man accused of killing an Upper East Side psychologist, several mental health experts are expected to testify about the defendant’s state of mind on the night of the slaying. But one of those experts, Dr. Kent D. Shinbach, did not come to his conclusions from the comfort of his desk.

Dr. Shinbach’s appraisal came to him as he was lying not far from a dead or dying colleague, looking up at a former patient, David Tarloff, who was wielding a bloody meat cleaver.

“He was entirely focused on the task at hand,” Dr. Shinbach, a psychiatrist, testified on Tuesday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan.

Dr. Shinbach, 75, shared an office suite with the dead psychologist, Kathryn Faughey. Mr. Tarloff’s lawyers are not contesting that he stabbed and slashed Ms. Faughey, 56, to death on Feb. 12, 2008. They are seeking to prove he was not responsible because of his mental illness.

The entire article is here.

Judge says Prozac factor in teen murder

Winnipeg Free Press

Sympatico.ca News

WINNIPEG - A Manitoba judge says a Winnipeg teen was driven to fatally stab another teen due to the adverse effects of an anti-depressant drug.

Provincial court Judge Robert Heinrichs agreed to keep the case in youth court, where the male youth now faces a maximum sentence of just four more years behind bars on the charge of second-degree murder.

Heinrichs said Friday the use of Prozac resulted in “unique circumstances” which he was forced to consider.

He described how the youth, who was 16 at the time of the stabbing in 2009, went from a loving, happy-go-lucky kid to a dark, depressed drug abuser who began to act out violently and even tried to harm himself on several occasions.

Heinrichs said it’s clear the youth's parents did the right thing in bringing their concerns to his various doctors, but they were largely ignored and the drug's dosage was increased.

Since his arrest, the youth is now clean of all drugs, has expressed remorse for his actions and greatly reduced his risk to the public.

“His basic normalcy now further confirms he no longer poses a risk of violence to anyone and that his mental deterioration and resulting violence would not have taken place without exposure to Prozac,” Heinrichs said in a written decision.

The entire story can be read here.