Mitigation specialists are charged with the critically important task of investigating capital defendant's life stories and are an indispensable part of any competent capital defense team. As the Supreme Court has held, their job is to uncover the "possibility of compassionate or mitigating factors stemming from the diverse frailties of humankind." The power of mitigation evidence has been demonstrated anecdotally when jurors have returned life sentences in numerous high-profile cases (including Lee Malvo, the young so-called Beltway Sniper; Terry Nichols, tried in both federal and state courts for the Oklahoma City bombing; and, most recently, Zacarias Moussaoui, who pled guilty to involvement in Al Qaeda’s 9/11 conspiracy).
Hofstra Law Review has a just released an important edition devoted to the topic of mitigation in capital cases. The entire edition is online here.
This edition has the ABA's Supplementary Guidelines for the Mitigation Function of Defense Teams in Death Penalty Cases (PDF), and articles by top capital defense lawyers, mitigation specialist, academics and judges discussing the mitigation function from a variety of perspectives.