The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
LIFE SKILLS
The lawyer saving murderers from death row
With capital punishment on the increase in Trump’s America, lawyer Elizabeth Vartkessian tells Jessamy Calkin about her life’s work, saving convicted prisoners from death row
In 2025 the United States executed 47 prisoners, the highest number in 16 years. This makes President Trump the most prolific “execution president” in recent history; at the end of his first term, in the run-up to Biden’s inauguration, five people were executed in the space of a few weeks, breaking with a 130-year-old precedent of pausing executions during a presidential transition. His second term has been equally deadly. He reinstated the federal death penalty on his first day in office, after a moratorium imposed in 2021.
A variety of methods have been implemented. The electric chair fell out of favour in the 1990s, after three incidents in Florida when the condemned men caught fire before dying. And after a shortage of thiopental – one of the chemicals used in lethal injections, which some countries refuse to export for use in the death penalty – nitrogen hypoxia gas has become the favoured method, a form of killing considered so brutal that even vets are very rarely permitted to use it to put down animals. In Alabama in 2024, Kenneth Eugene Smith writhed around for several minutes before he became the first person to be executed by nitrogen gas.
Last year, Brad Sigmon became the first man in 15 years to die by firing squad. It makes you wonder what might come next – the guillotine? Meanwhile, in one of the many convoluted ironies that are so prevalent in the American system of capital punishment, Sonny Burton, who is 75 and has been on death row in Alabama for more than 30 years for a killing that even the state agrees he didn’t commit or order (but was present for, and has expressed deep remorse), has become so infirm that he has to wear a helmet to protect his head in case he falls over while awaiting his execution date.
Elizabeth Vartkessian is doing all she can to keep prisoners off death row. “He can’t even stand up,” she says of Burton’s situation, “and it just begs the question, why are we so desperate to kill people? It’s grotesque to me that this is how people spend their time, energy and money.” She is a mitigation expert, which means that her job is to collect mitigating evidence to prevent people from being sentenced to death, or to get their death sentences commuted to life without parole. It’s not about trying to prove their innocence; there are other organisations such as the Innocence Project that do that (though she has occasionally been involved in cases in which the accused turned out to be innocent). She defines her role as being “to investigate the life of an accused or convicted person, to provide context, something which the overworked and sometimes incompetent defence teams have failed to do”.
Vartkessian, who was born in San Francisco but is the daughter of an Iraqi father and a Polish mother, has a PHD in law from Oxford and is the founding executive director of Advancing Real Change (ARC), a national non-profit company located in Baltimore, Maryland, dedicated to conducting thorough life history investigations in criminal cases. This involves months and often years of interviews, invariably conducted in person and often unannounced, exploring every aspect of the client’s life – from family members going back three generations, to teachers, prison guards, jury members, co-workers, psychiatrists. It’s an exhaustive and very specialist skill, and they have a high success rate.
As Vartkessian says, “[In] 95 per cent of the cases in which I have worked, I have been able to avoid sentences of death or executions for my clients. I have never had a client sentenced to death when I get involved before the trial occurs.”
She prefers to take on cases where their guilt is not in question. “Where there is video footage, it’s daylight, and there are witnesses and a confession – those are the kind of cases where I think the work that I do is fundamental, because the community has already judged this person to be a monster.”
Vartkessian is not trying to excuse criminals or exonerate them. “I want to be clear that most of my clients, all but one of whom have been men, are responsible for the violent death of another person. That death wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t self-defence. My clients didn’t kill for compassionate reasons, like euthanasia for the sick and dying… The murders my clients committed were often brutal, extreme and irrational.”
This quote is from her absorbing and beautifully written book, The Deserving: Humanity, Justice and Hope for the Condemned, in which we meet several of the prisoners she has worked with. There is Edward, whose mother used to chain him to the bed all day when he was a toddler while she was at work.
And there is Wesley Purkey, who died in 2020, who she says she thinks about every day and is one of the few people she couldn’t save. Vartkessian has never witnessed an execution herself, but she says: “If my client wanted me to, I would. I would have witnessed Wes’s execution if I hadn’t just given birth.”
Purkey was a hard nut to crack but in the end he came to trust Vartkessian and they developed a close relationship. “Everyone deserves to see a face of love at the end of their life, I don’t care what they’ve done. He asked four people to be there: two members of his legal team who he was close to, and a monk, his spiritual adviser. He wasn’t afraid of dying, his life was a crucible, and in death there was going to be peace.”
Purkey was sentenced to death for the rape and murder of 16-year-old Jennifer Long. Vartkessian was brought in at a late stage by his new legal team to see if she could help support him. She had never worked with someone who had endured
as much as Purkey, she says. He didn’t speak until he was six. From an early age he was beaten by his stepfather and his mother, who was a violent alcoholic, who forced him to engage in sex with her from the age of nine to 22.
He had spent much of his adult life in prison. Hired by his legal team, Vartkessian carried out an investigation over four years which, she says, should have been done in advance of his trial. Appeals centred on the insufficient work of his original defence lawyer at the trial, who did an inadequate job of investigating his past, and his mental capacity.
In the end, despite pending appeals, the Trump administration scheduled an execution date for Purkey in December 2019, which he and the other men who were given dates all survived. Committed to seeing executions through, the Trump administration set a second execution date in July 2020. “Trump had changed the make-up for the Supreme Court by that point and they lifted all the orders that were in place by other federal and state courts to allow his execution,” Vartkessian says. “That was something I had never seen before.”
Stays were issued due to the shortage of lethal drugs and then the pandemic happened, but even that couldn’t prevent the inevitable and Purkey was killed by lethal injection 13 days after Vartkessian’s daughter was born, becoming the second federal execution in 17 years. He had taken up knitting in jail, and made gifts for her baby, and a black and white panda arrived at her office the day after he died.
When I talk to her over Zoom, Vartkessian is at home in Baltimore, where she lives with her Irish husband Jonathan Kerr, a former barrister and now law professor, and their two children, aged five and two. The book took her three years to write and she had to fit it around her job. There are 10 mitigation experts working with her, and her office has to turn down cases every week. To give an idea of the scope of things in the American penal system, there are more than 56,000 prisoners serving life without parole, as of January 2025, and approximately 2,000 on death row, including 44 women. The first execution of the year took place last month in Texas, which is the state that tops the execution table, with a total of 597 carried out in the past 50 years.
Meanwhile, California, incongruously, holds the record for handing out death sentences and currently has 256 inmates on death row, but for the last 20 years has had a moratorium on executions.
‘[In] 95 per cent of cases, I have been able to avoid sentences of death or executions for my clients’
“What’s interesting about California,” Vartkessian says, “is that the governor [Gavin Newsom] can’t get rid of the death penalty unilaterally without a referendum – the only way is for the people to decide, and the last referendum [in 2016] was very close – I think 53 per cent of voters chose to keep it. But Newsom has been very active in doing what he can to dismantle capital punishment in the state – his administration took apart the death chamber, so even if somebody signed a death warrant and attempted to have an execution carried out, there is no place in California for it to happen. He’s done what he can within the extent of his power to gum up the process.”
Things have got much worse under Trump, she says, and the federal government’s focus on retribution. The number of executions increased significantly last year, “but it was only because [Ron] Desantis [in Florida] decided to execute somebody about once every three weeks – and I don’t want to be a cynical person because that’s not who I am at my core, but if you look at a timeline of events, Desantis had not allowed a single execution until he made his bid to be president. And then he started executing people and he has not stopped – 19 people, more in one year than any other Florida governor.”
In rare cases, Vartkessian says, her clients would rather be on death row, which means solitary confinement, because the conditions in many American prisons are so terrible. “The county jail in Mobile, Alabama, is the worst place I have ever been,” she states. A prisoner there called Derrick Dearman, who Vartkessian didn’t work with, but had met a few times, was determined to get to death row and waived all his appeals. He got his wish. “He wanted to die because the jail was so horrible. I’ve often had clients who tell me they want to die, but usually at some stage that changes.”
When she succeeds in saving the client from the death penalty, it’s a bittersweet feeling: “Because that person will never get out of prison, and you’ve helped achieve that. Every time it happens I’m both relieved and horrified.”
Vartkessian is not suggesting for a moment that people should be exonerated because of their histories. And there is a section in the book about victims and their families and how they are frequently let down by the criminal justice system, and the lack of support they receive. But for the perpetrators, it all comes down to the basic question of what prison is for, punishment or rehabilitation, and in America in particular, this can depend on the warden.
“For example, with the case I’m working on right now, the previous warden of the jail allowed prisoners to do artwork, and this new warden will not allow any artwork. There’s no consistency in policy, it depends on who is leading that particular institution. And the least expensive
thing to do is to keep somebody in their cell for 24 hours a day.”
Her view of the ideal prison is the system in Norway, which starts from the premise that the loss of liberty is the punishment, and rehabilitation of prisoners is the priority. “I love Norway,” she sighs. “If the idea is that you’re going to punish somebody because there has to be a consequence, well taking away somebody’s freedom is consequence enough. I mean, we went through Covid – people know how heartbreaking it is not to be able to see loved ones, everyone either experienced the death of a loved one during the pandemic or knew someone who did. Not being able to be with someone when they die or to grieve their loss, that is punishment enough, but we choose to take so much more, and it doesn’t lead to better outcomes.”
She cites the Bard Prison Initiative in New York as something to aspire to. “They have this wonderful educational prison programme and of the people who complete it and are released, the recidivism rate is two per cent. What a tremendous investment. But when some people find out that education is being provided, they get upset – thinking that prisoners shouldn’t be allowed access to education. Well it’s in your interest that this person doesn’t reoffend when they come out, so why make decisions against your interest? Even if you don’t believe that this is what the prisoner deserves – don’t you deserve to live in a safer community?”
There will be many people who are critical of what she does, who will counter that no matter what their background, the perpetrators had a choice. “The truth is that by the time someone is on the verge of committing a murder,” she writes, “their trauma responses have been formed and well honed… their neural pathways are paved. The choice my client faces, in that nanosecond, is no choice at all.
“Each case I work on could be described as a life that’s fallen through some kind of crack. So many moments in a life when, had the focus been genuine care and concern, the scales might have balanced differently. This wasn’t something I knew until I started working with people who had killed; how grace and love did more to transform a person than anything. Genuine human connection is the most powerful and restorative force in human existence.”
How does she cope with it all? In the early days, she says, she used to cry a lot. But no longer. “I go to a therapist. Everyone who works in these spaces – emergency room doctors, police officers – should all be in therapy. And I have support – my husband is wonderful. I have my children, they bring me joy. I listen to a lot of stand-up comedy, I go to live shows, I love terrible reality television, it brings me happiness.
“I focus on what I’ve done to support people. Change happens in moments of connection; I can feel people becoming lighter, and that’s such a beautiful thing. So I don’t find my job to be difficult. Is it emotional for me? Absolutely, and the day it stops being emotional is the day I have to quit, because then there’s a problem.”