Today, Explained - How to save a murderer

Episode Date: March 7, 2023

Should past trauma prevent a convicted killer from being executed? The Marshall Project’s Maurice Chammah reports on “mitigation specialists” who try to save the lives of death row inmates by investigating their histories. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Matt Collette, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King with a quick note. Today's show is about a death row inmate and there are some descriptions of violence throughout it. So take heed, please. In the criminal justice system, a death sentence is not always final. There's a little known job called mitigation specialist. And this is a person hired to look into the past of a death row inmate and see if there's some trauma that might convince a jury to be lenient, something in childhood maybe. I mean, she found a beat cop, like a older Italian guy who described the constant violence and the way he would sort of pity the kids who were growing up there. In Florida, a woman was assigned to dig into the past of such an inmate.

He said, my cousin, he's a model tragedy in Black American life. This is what those neighborhoods did to people. This is what Rikers and sending people to prison too young does to them. And it's a tragedy. Ahead her story, could what she found in this guilty man's past get him off of death row? The all-new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever. Want more ways to follow your faves? Check out our new player prop tracking with real-time notifications. Or how about more ways to customize your casino page

with our new favorite and recently played games tabs? And to top it all off, quick and secure withdrawals. Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. It's Today Explained. Maurice Chamas, reporter with The Marshall Project. Tell me about James Bernard Belcher.

James Bernard Belcher committed an atrocious murder in 1996, where he got into the apartment of a young woman named Jennifer Embry in Jacksonville, Florida, and she was then found the next day raped and drowned and strangled. And at the time, there was no DNA to match anyone, but over time, they found DNA on some of the evidence that eventually matched James Bernard Belcher, who at this point was already in prison for a different crime. So the prosecutors say, look, this guy has gone after women in the past. He's committed sexual crimes. He's robbed women on the street.

And the jury says, yeah, this is a dangerous guy. And they sentence him to death. The jury is actually out for only 16 minutes at his original trial before he's sent to death row. But then about 15 years pass and a Supreme Court decision comes down. The high court ruled the entire system Florida's criminal courts use to sentence convicts to death is unconstitutional because it gives judges too much power in the decision as opposed to the jury. Dozens and dozens of people on death row in Florida are entitled to new sentencing hearings. So as of 2016, it becomes clear that Belcher is going to get a new sentencing hearing

and have a new jury consider whether he's going to get the death penalty or instead get a life sentence in prison. Okay, so he is guilty for sure. The new hearing is about what should his punishment be, life in prison or death. How did you become aware of this guy? I've been reporting on the death penalty for more than 10 years. And throughout that time,

I had met a handful of members of this kind of secretive profession called mitigation specialists. They are investigators who research the life stories of people who face the death penalty and then bring that information into court and use it to try to convince juries and prosecutors to choose less severe punishments. So life in prison as opposed to the death penalty, or maybe the possibility of parole as opposed to life without parole. And throughout conversations with these mitigation specialists, I kept coming back to this one named Sarah Baldwin, who's based in Jacksonville, Florida. She's very open in terms of her process,

and we had these conversations about her work, and eventually I pitched her on the idea of following her along as she investigated a case to really see, you know, in the weeds, what does it look like when you investigate someone's life like this and then bring that information to a jury? Sarah said, you know, provisionally, OK, but there were a lot of kind of ethical concerns about, you know, watching the defense basically be prepared in a case, you know, with this high stakes life and death litigation. But over time, we had conversations with his lawyers. And then I was, you know, exchanging snail mail letters with Belcher himself. And he eventually agreed to go through this process and to let me watch Sarah at work.

I'm a pretty informed person. I read a lot of news. I cover a lot of news. I had never heard the term mitigation specialist until I read your piece. Is this a job that is known among the court system and criminal justice reporters? It's really just known within certain circles of the criminal justice system, especially related to the death penalty, because these mitigation specialists are now a mainstay in capital cases. So you're going to see them more in states that have the death penalty, like Texas and Florida. But they're increasingly wellknown in kind of public defender

circles. So now if you go to, you know, the Bronx Defenders or the Brooklyn Defenders Service, you're going to have social workers on staff who are doing work sort of like mitigation specialists. They may go to mitigation specialist trainings. You're starting to see an awareness grow, but they remain obscure. And I think part of that is because it was by design. People who defended people who committed terrible crimes, defense lawyers, public defenders, even they weren't terribly open about their work because there was this perception that the public disliked them or thought that they were, you know, basically helping criminals get off.

And mitigation specialists are sort of a more extreme version of that, where they were really seen as like, kind of too close to the bad guys, quote unquote. And so as a result, I think they were very kind of reasonably shy about public attention. And only in the last few years with, you know, movies like Just Mercy. If we say we're committed to equal justice under law, to protecting the rights of every citizen, regardless of wealth, race, or status, then we have to end this nightmare for Walter McMillan and his family. And kind of an awareness that criminal defense lawyers are, in a way, a certain sort of human rights advocate, have mitigation specialists, I think, kind of come out into the open and been a little bit more public about their work. Who is doing the hiring? Is it the person on death row?

Is it the person on death row's lawyer? It's the person on death row's lawyer. Now, sometimes mitigation specialists are full-time employees of a public defender office, and sometimes they're kind of freelance investigators who get hired by defense teams. Okay. And so once a mitigation specialist is assigned, there's somebody in the county who does this job, we're going to put them on the case, what do they do precisely? They dig deeply into the life story

of the person facing the punishment. When you look at a crime and somebody says, how could a person do that? There's always an answer to that question. And it's not because the person had a nice family and a nice life and just decided that they wanted to be a murderer. There's always a reason that they became the way that they are.

What that looks like practically is going to every hospital, jail, court, you know, any kind of public record that relates to this person. They're going to try to get it, you know, and this is going to lead to often thousands and thousands of pages. And it was all a way of just kind of understanding, you know, what brought this person to this particular place and time. And so the mitigation specialist, you know, they start interviewing this person, learning about the course of their life, going to the different counties and states where these records exist and getting those records. As soon as I get the case, I meet the client and start trying to get a history and figure out what the issues are. You have trauma, mental illness, intellectual disability, poverty, I mean, those are all issues

that are common themes in our cases, but we have to get to know our clients and decide exactly what the issues are gonna be and what experts we're gonna need to bring in. Then they start doing interviews with everyone around the person. So that can be their parents, it can be their grandparents, cousins, anyone who grew up with them.

I once heard a mitigation specialist tell me that she found an old yearbook from this person's elementary school and just started looking for other kids who had been in their elementary school class. That seemed like a really above and beyond task to me. But one way of describing it that I found striking was that, you know, what if your client was sexually violated as a child? And this was a really key moment in their life that the jury should hear about because it helps understand their path to their crime. While that sexual violation, they'd be there too ashamed to admit it. Maybe their parents have reasons not to admit it.

And so it's only the estranged third cousin that you happen to get to. On your fifth meeting with them, they say, "'Well, you know what? "'I heard this thing happen when I was a kid.'" And suddenly the door opens to a whole story that helps make sense of this person's path. You only get there through just, you know, relentless shoe leather research and investigation.

Is there scientific research that ties trauma to violence later on? Like, is this grounded in science or grounded in feelings? I'll say two things. First of all, it is grounded in feelings because the defense attorneys would say it's not just explaining the crime. And we often maybe can't explain the crime because the tools of science, the tools of sociology have not gotten us there yet, right? So mitigation specialists are often researching any fact that can mitigate the crime and evoke mercy from the jury. So that could be childhood trauma. It

could be a brain injury or something very physical and scientific. It could also be things that are just sort of moving, like the fact that once they got to prison, they were a mentor figure to younger prisoners or that they were a really caring father in addition to the crime that they committed. So anything that can evoke feelings. So on the one hand, there's the feelings piece of it. But what mitigation specialists practically are often doing is looking for how did trauma shape this person's path. And there is nascent brain science that gets us there. So we know that when somebody suffers severe trauma, especially as a child, it affects sort of their neural pathways. And so the amygdala, the frontal lobe, the hippocampus, all the parts of the brain that affect impulse control and aggression and rage,

and your sort of response to fear, those can get shaped and kind of rewired through a traumatic childhood so that you are less good at impulse control. And especially when you don't have, you know, therapy or deep brain stimulation or other kinds of interventions that can help, you see repeatedly that people kind of spiral towards riskier and deeper violence. This woman, Sarah Baldwin, who you met, the mitigation specialist, how did she get into this line of work? So Sarah Baldwin grew up in Florida, in Jacksonville. She was, you know, married a few times, had kids. She was a stay-at-home mom. She was, you know, married a few times, had kids.

She was a stay-at-home mom. She was a chef. And then she went to social work school and fell in as an intern with criminal defense lawyers who were focused on the death penalty and specifically focused on, you know, the last minute saving people from execution. So she was being sent out to Death Row to interview and talk to men about their pasts and use that information to then go to the governor or the public and say, we should really spare this person's life. This was in the 1990s. The profession had sort of developed in the 1970s and 80s and 90s. So once Baldwin got into it, there were ways to get trained. There were, you know, older mitigation specialists who were able to mentor her. But then she just started taking

cases and diving in and learning about the past of her clients. How did she meet the criminal, James Belcher? So around 2018, she had a full-time job at the public defender's office in Jacksonville, Florida. And as I mentioned before, James Belcher was given a new sentencing hearing, and so she was assigned to his case. She then left the office and became a freelancer, but kept on with his case. And this led to more than a dozen meetings where she drove out to death row and interviewed him and then slowly started interviewing his family members. In early 2022, they set a trial date for Mr. Belcher in the fall. And so it was

really, you know, the spring and the summer that she got, you know, deeply enmeshed in the intensive work of examining his life. Coming up, Sarah Baldwin found a lot of trauma in his life, but could it save James Belcher? Thank you. and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join RAMP.

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We're back with the story of Sarah Baldwin. She's a mitigation specialist who was given the assignment of looking into the history of a death row inmate named James Bernard Belcher. Maurice Chabot, reporter for The Marshall Project, what did Sarah Baldwin learn about her client? So many mitigation specialists are already looking at early childhood to try to understand trauma. And she learned from her client that his family had migrated from Jacksonville up to Brooklyn, New York, as part of the broader great migration of Black Americans in the 1950s and 60s. And in New York, his mother divorced his father.

But Sarah learned that there was sort of violent conflict between the mother and father. And it reached the point where the mother took a blade and she actually slashed the father's stomach all the way down the middle. It sent him to the hospital for a week. He almost died. And the son was about 10 years old at the time. The mother says that the father was regularly beating and choking her. So you imagine a child who is just constantly around violence and situations of intimacy. He is then neglected by his mother and stepfather. And in order to have enough money to buy shoes and clothes in the public housing projects that he's living in as a

teenager, he starts to rob the coat pockets and purses of his teachers at school, hanging on the rack. And then he pretends to have a gun and mugs women on the street. And I think this was a key discovery for Sarah Baldwin, that when he was 16 years old, he was sent to Rikers Island, you know, the notoriously violent jail in New York City. And he was surrounded by violence there. He described sexual assaults just constantly, that he had friends who were being sexually assaulted every day. He never said that he was sexually assaulted, but he gets out of Rikers and New York prisons and then gets essentially no help from the state in the form of any sort of reentry services or counseling. Did Larry suggest that you get Bernard mental health counseling? Yes.

And did Sister Priscilla also recommend that? Yes. Did you accept their recommendation? No, I didn't. Okay, so he has laid out a very dark and difficult childhood for Sarah Baldwin. And then I guess it's on her to track some of these people down. Who does she end up talking to? All sorts of people.

Can you please introduce yourself to the jury? My name is Wayne Lorenzo Deese. He's Belcher's first cousin and is really this almost poignant example of who Belcher might have become if he had a very different set of circumstances and influences. Deese had become a Wall Street banker. He had had a bit of a career in journalism and written for the New York Times and just a very successful person. He said that, you know, his cousin Bernard was very much like him as a child, very much a kind of protector, mentor figure.

He was viewed by me as my older brother, my beloved older brother. He was a leader, a role model. He taught me. He basically was my protector on many occasions. He helped guide me. Wayne, the cousin, got bused to a white school and then his parents put him in private school,

whereas Belcher, you know, was sent to the worst schools in New York City. The schools are horrible. The conditions are horrible. The attention span that the teachers give you are near to their best. And that ends up at Rikers Island, where he's not really getting schooling at all.

So she talks, of course, for hours and hours to both of the parents. She finds many other cousins and uncles who can describe the sort of environment, the violence between the parents and the sorts of, you know, environmental violence that he was experiencing as a young child, even things that Belcher himself did not remember.

So she used all these different sources to kind of connect the dots and tell a story about his life. And all of those dots and that story lead her to conclude what exactly? She concludes that trauma really infected Mr. Belcher's brain at a young age and set him on a path that maybe he could have come back from, but that at every moment that he could have come back from it, there was sort of no help for him. So his mother seemed to be checked out for many years. He did get to go to college for some months after jail, but it didn't work out for him. His family kind of left him behind overall. All the cousins and aunts and uncles who had helped him once he kept stealing and committing crimes basically, you know, left him. We can all, I think, imagine the kind of wayward cousin family member that we're just sort of sick of and move on from and leave on their own.

And he fell further and further until he committed this crime. And so she ultimately couldn't explain this is why he killed Jennifer Embry. But she did kind of unearth enough of the story of his early life. I think that you can see like this isn't somebody who just woke up one day with a psychopathic tendency to want to murder people. This was somebody whose psychology, whose brain was deeply affected and broken in certain key ways. Even if we can't, we don't have the scientific language to describe all of them yet, that set him on this path towards violence. All right. So our mitigation specialist has done her job. She's found a lot of stuff about this man's early life. And then comes the sentencing. And the stakes here are that Mr. Belcher is either

going to be sentenced to death or he's going to be sentenced to life in prison. What ultimately happens? It was one of the most profound reporting experiences I have ever had. I spent two weeks in Jacksonville, Florida, every day from roughly nine to five, going into this courtroom and just watching this trial play out. The first couple of days, I was watching jury selections, and you saw a real reckoning. You saw people cry and say, I don't think I could ever, you know, I support the death penalty in theory, but I don't think I could look someone in the face and give them the death penalty. And then you had other people who said, sure, I can give them the death penalty.

And I'll tell you right now, I don't think their childhood matters at all. And we then witnessed, I think about five to six full days of testimony. And you had the prosecution really try to tell a story of, you know, here's a man who has relentlessly caused pain to women. So there were stories of him robbing women on the street as a child, and they couldn't necessarily find those women to testify. But they did find a woman who he had manipulated into giving her home address. He then snuck into her apartment and it was a horrific sexual violation. And the whole courtroom was, you know, you could hear a pin drop. The jurors were just staring at this woman in horror, looking over at this elderly Black man thinking, you know, how, like, how did this happen, right? And the prosecution really spun that forward to say,

well, this woman survived, but Jennifer Embry, the victim in this murder, did not survive that same violation, that same crime. We also heard testimony from the family members of Jennifer Embry. Walking into her apartment and finding her in the bathtub, deceased, is an image that I would never get out of my head. During that moment, I felt more pain than I have ever felt in my life. It has been 26 years, yet it feels like it was just yesterday.

You really felt for them and you really got the sense that the process offers the victim family very little beyond, you know, the promise of a harsher punishment, like the death penalty being a kind of service to them. And then, you know, if they don't get it, it being a kind of, you know, further harm to them. So they were in the courtroom the whole time watching as it transitioned from the prosecution's case to the defense's case. A series of witnesses from Belcher's life went up on the stand and described the horrible circumstances of his childhood. And then you had experts on Rikers Island and on incarceration get up and talk about the effects of trauma. You had psychologists. And then you saw these family members really break down about the fact that they kind of abandoned this kid, right? That he needed help, and they had abandoned him,

and they felt horrible. I mean, his mother said, you know, everyone thought he needed therapy, but I just thought that was for crazy people. First of all, I didn't think that, you know, that my child was crazy. That's what I was dumb enough to think. who just got swept into this story of trauma and reckoning. The closing arguments were very dramatic. And the defense lawyer said, look, this guy did a terrible thing. This defense lawyer kind

of reminded me of Mr. Rogers because he was saying to the jury, like, you have permission to feel the feelings that you're having, right? We're not trying to tell you don't feel anger and rage and sadness at this crime. We're just saying, let Belcher live the rest of his life in prison as opposed to execute him, which would then create more pain for his mother, for everyone around him. And it was very poignant. A jury hears all of this testimony, and what do they decide? So they come into the courtroom slowly. It felt like it took forever. I'm sitting next to Sarah Baldwin as she's clutching Belcher's mother's hands, you know,

super tightly, and they're praying together. I have never witnessed an execution, but this felt like the closest I'd ever come because it felt like this pin drop moment where the jury is going to make a decision of life or death. But finally, they say, at least one juror finds that the mitigating factors outweigh the aggravating factors, which means that the juryating factors outweigh the aggravating factors, which means that the jury has come out in favor of the mitigation, which means in favor of life.

And so he's not going to get the death penalty. At that moment, there's this wave of relief in the courtroom. You're hearing Earlene, the mother, say, thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus. And Sarah Baldwin, the investigator, leans over to her and says, you're free, Earlene. You're free. Youlene, you're free. You know, your son is not going to face execution anymore.

And then that was it. And everyone went home and Sarah Baldwin moved on to her next case. And all these players, you know, some of them keep in touch with each other, but, you know, for the professionals, the mitigation specialists and the lawyers, it was like, okay, that was that case.

Now on to the next one. Maurice Chama with The Marshall Project. Today's episode was produced by Hadi Mouagdi and edited by Jolie Myers. It was fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Matthew Collette and engineered by Patrick Boyd and Paul Robert Mouncey. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained.