Dr. Elizabeth Vartkessian practices and teaches the “gold standard” of mitigation. She previously worked as a mitigation specialist in Houston and is now executive director of the national nonprofit Advancing Real Change based in Baltimore, MD. Dr. The nonprofit hosts a team of mitigation specialists who assist on defense teams for indigent clients facing extreme sentences across the country. Dr. Vartkessian has a Ph.D in Law and an M.S. in Comparative Social Policy from the University of Oxford as well as a B.A. in Philosophy and Political Science from George Washington University. She is a researcher with the Capital Jury Project—a research project that seeks to understand how capital jurors make their sentencing decisions, and 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 this CLE, Dr. Vartkessian will teach us how to implement the gold standard of mitigation through investigation, pretrial negotiations, and presentation at trial. She will also talk about findings from the Capital Jury Project and how those findings can inform our mitigation investigation and presentation.

PDO Board Meeting. Registration required. 

Jani Maselli Wood will be discussing the recent cases from the Court of Criminal Appeals and Court of Appeals as they pertain to criminal defense practice.

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October 11 - 12, 2023