Introduction
I have attended many seminars and lectures on criminal mitigation and almost all pertain to criminal defendants who have grown up poor, endured learning disabilities, and experienced violence and trauma. Mitigation for such clients inevitably focuses on the extreme personal and environmental hardships that the person has experienced during their formative childhood years and the negative impact of such trauma on the client’s healthy and safe growth and development.
But what about the white collar defendant who grew up in a middle class neighborhood?
MITIGATION PREVENTS GUESSWORK
Mitigation prevents guesswork on the part of the prosecutor. Because it is natural for people to find patterns and meaning in things even if they are not present, people naturally tend to fill in untrue or irrelevant facts into what they see.
Mitigation reports help minimize or even eliminate assumptions, prejudices, and biases of the prosecutor by completing an otherwise incomplete picture.
HUMANIZING THE DEFENDANT
The mitigation report forces the prosecutor to consider the defendant as a real person by: • Documenting the person’s life history
• Humanizing the defendant through a sympathetic narrative
• Inducing empathy in the reader.
CLIENTS WHO MOST BENEFIT FROM WHITE COLLAR MITIGATION
It is traditionally thought that the client’s who most benefit from mitigation reports are those with mental health problems, extreme hardships to themselves or their family members, those who have experienced childhood traumas, and those who suffer from educational or learning deficits with little ability to explain their psychosocial backgrounds. Yet, the reality is that anyone can benefit from a mitigation expert, or at the very least a mitigation consult, and the white collar defendant is no less deserving of this service and vantage point.
In some respects the multiple offender who grew up in poverty may well have persons in the system familiar with their situation and case notes that support their deprived backgrounds. In contrast, the white collar defendant comes as a novice to the criminal justice system and requires as much support and guidance from professionals as is humanly possible.