Rebecca Cohen shares career as death row mitigator

Cohen spoke to junior English classes about carceral justice

By Erin Malinn Feature Editor

Mitigation investigator Rebecca Cohen spoke to junior English classes on March 8 about her work in death penalty cases and the lasting impact she has left on her clients and their families. The presentation followed the classes’ unit on Bryan Stevenson’s memoir “Just Mercy,” which chronicles Stevenson’s career as an attorney and the creation of his foundation, the Equal Justice Initiative. While Cohen was attending Yale University, she took a death penalty class where she learned about a 17-year-old boy who was wrongly executed on death row. This story inspired Cohen to take time off college to work on death row cases, sending letters to attorneys all over the country volunteering to help with their cases. After Stevenson responded to her letter, she took a semester off to work with him in Montgomery, Alabama. Since then, Cohen has been working in the criminal justice field for over 30 years, and she advocates for clients in a number of the 27 states where the death penalty is legal.

“Having Rebecca Cohen come talk to the kids was great after reading ‘Just Mercy’ because she hopefully helped to broaden student’s understanding of justice beyond punitive measures and encourage them to consider the complexities of human behavior and experience,” English teacher Bailey Tighe said.

Cohen taught students about the history of the death penalty and the role of mitigation in this process. She explained that despite changes to the death penalty over the years, the process was still discriminatory, particularly towards Black defendants. Therefore, mitigation specialists spend months working with defendants, their legal team and their friends and families to provide jurors with a more well-rounded picture of the defendant’s life. By presenting information to the jury about a defendant’s past—such as abuse, neglect, disability or other traumas—mitigation specialists hope to persuade jurors to sentence clients to life in prison instead of sentencing them to death.

“We are more than the worst thing we have ever done,” Cohen said. “A mitigation specialist’s job is to find the ‘more’ in someone else’s life.”

One of Cohen’s biggest struggles in her job is time—or lack thereof. If a specialist or a lawyer does not have enough time to build trust with their client, the client will never share valuable personal information. Many of Cohen’s clients discuss, often for the first time, trauma that occurred decades ago. The importance of hearing directly from the client, rather than a witness who can provide a full story, is to understand how they think, whether or not the information aligns with the case story.

“I think of my clients’ lives as puzzles, as them having the most obvious pieces of the puzzles. But it depends on who they are and their circumstances to how many pieces they have,” Cohen said.

Rather than only focusing on if a client is innocent or guilty, Cohen advocates for a more empathetic approach. She argues that the death row is inhumane even for clients who are guilty, and the only difference between a guilty or innocent client is how she approaches her defense.

“My hope is that kids understand that people are more than their mistakes and that their past actions do not define their entire identity or worth as individuals,” Tighe said.