Jennifer Wynn’s job is to make jurors feel sympathy for people who’ve committed unspeakable crimes
“We hear all about the victims,” Jennifer Wynn told me recently, “but we never hear about the defendant’s story.”
Wynn, cheerful and salty, is a mitigation specialist. She is engaged by defense attorneys, mostly in capital cases, to investigate and compile the life story of the defendant. The material Wynn gathers, often heartbreaking and brutal, is used to convince the jury to deliver a sentence other than death. (In non-capital cases the same person is called a sentencing advocate, and they similarly argue for a less-severe sentence.)
More often than not, mitigation specialists are paid for by the criminal court. Defendants in death penalty cases can rarely afford their own attorneys, much less a mitigation specialist.
“The most important job, whether it’s a capital case or non-capital case, is to tell the lived experience of the defendant,” Wynn said. That experience is harrowing. Defendants, particularly in capital cases, oftentimes have suffered physical and emotional victimization themselves. According to a study of life histories of 43 men on death row, “Severe and multiple forms of abuse were endemic” and “typically multigenerational.”
Mark Pickett, an attorney who has worked on dozens of capital cases, told me, “I’m sure there are a handful of outliers, but I can’t think of a single case off the top of my head where the client didn’t suffer some form of serious abuse in childhood. The cycle of abuse in these cases typically goes back several generations and is often combined with extreme poverty, alcohol and drug addiction, neglect, and untreated serious mental illness.”
It falls to the jury to decide if the mitigators (elements or factors that lessen culpability which a jury may weigh in deciding whether or not to impose a death sentence) outweigh the aggravators (statutorily-defined elements that the state must prove exist beyond a reasonable doubt exist, in order to certify a case death penalty-eligible). All it takes is one juror to send the convicted to life in prison without parole instead of the execution chamber.
Wynn’s entrance into the field, she says, was “a fluke.” While she earned a Ph.D. in criminal justice, she was an adjunct at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and worked full-time on a Rikers Island re-entry program called Fresh Start. She caught the attention of Court Consultation Services, a small but highly respected organization founded by Louise Luck, who has been involved in hundreds of death penalty cases — including the Craigslist murderess — and has done mitigation work for more than 30 years. Two years later, Wynn went out on her own. She has now done mitigation work on 30 murder cases, 25 of which were death penalty-eligible, and won them all.
Wynn talked recently to MEL about a few cases. Names of her clients and their family members have been changed, to allow her to talk in depth about them.
Jack Johnson
A police officer and another man were shot and killed. Jack had just been paroled on another offense, and had an ankle bracelet. Jack and a friend were accused.
One challenge here was that Jack, like a lot of my clients, is a man of very few words. Their poverty of speech is profound. It’s not because he’s trying to conceal anything. He simply has a low IQ. He’s borderline retarded, like many people sitting on death row.
He told me for two years he wasn’t the shooter; his friend was. He’d taken the rap for him. Code of the street. His first attorney did nothing. By the time I met him, he’d been in jail for a year and had seen his lawyer once.
It can be difficult to tell a client, Tell me about your awful upbringing so we can hopefully get you life in prison, when the person’s like, I didn’t fucking do this. A person claiming innocence is understandably not interested in hearing about life in prison. I have to overcome that challenge.
