Houston Hustle

Houston Hustle

Project 2013-07-19 03:40:09 +1200

WHY PLEDGE ME?

I have elected to undertake an internship in Houston, Texas, U.S.A., working for - The Gulf Region Advocacy Centre (GRACE) "an independent, client-centered, Houston-based charity that provides high quality capital defense to indigents facing the death penalty," (http://gracelaw.org/). My internship will span three months, during which time I will have to fully support myself financially (GRACE interns volunteer their help, they do not get paid for their work). I want to raise $3,500 over the next two months to cover the cost of my flights and accommodation.

ABOUT GRACE

The key factor in GRACE's work is the mitigation process. During this process there is a chance to tell the life story of the defendant to the jurors or judge, to provide a narrative of the mitigating circumstances that led them to court. This can have a crucial influence on the sentencing decision as the contextual setting can emphasise the humanity of the defendant. In an interesting article by Jeffrey Toobin (The New Yorker), Scharlette Holdman, a pioneer in the field, describes the importance and difficulties of the mitigation process: 

“It requires not just knowledge and skill but experience in how you search for, identify, locate, recognize, and preserve the information.” Since the lives of death-penalty defendants often feature a tangle of pathologies, including drug addiction and sexual abuse (sometimes by family members), it’s not easy to draw out those stories, much less present them in court. “The fact that someone tells you that story in their living room is a long, long way from getting them to tell you that story in a public courtroom.”

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/09/110509fa_fact_toobin?currentPage=1

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