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36 Hofstra L. Rev. 923 (2007-2008)
The Importance of Recognizing Trauma throughout Capital Mitigation Investigations and Presentations

handle is hein.journals/hoflr36 and id is 933 raw text is: THE IMPORTANCE OF RECOGNIZING TRAUMA THROUGHOUT CAPITAL MITIGATION INVESTIGATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS Kathleen Wayland* I. INTRODUCTION Psychological trauma lies at the heart of death penalty cases. This is most immediately and obviously true because of the unspeakable grief and irrevocably altered lives that follow the loss of a loved one to homicide. But it is also an almost universal feature of the lives of capitally charged and convicted defendants.' Assessing the role of trauma is (or should be) an essential component of any competent mitigation investigation and any competent assessment of mental health * Dr. Kathleen Wayland received a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Duke University in 1989. She was part of the faculty at Duke University Medical Center from 1990 to 1995, where her primary area of research and clinical interest was in traumatic stress syndromes. From 1993 until 2002, Dr. Wayland was a member of the California Appellate Project (CAP) in San Francisco, California, where she assisted staff attorneys and private counsel representing prisoners under sentence of death to identify mental health issues and mitigation themes in the lives of clients and their family members. From March of 2002 to March of 2008, Dr. Wayland was on the staff of the Habeas Corpus Resource Center (HCRC), where she was involved in efforts to develop resources and training to assist HCRC's legal staff and the defense bar in their representation of Death Row inmates. Dr. Wayland is currently in private practice in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and consults nationally on capital cases. The author would like to thank James Pultz, Sean O'Brien, Andrew S. Rowland, and Russell Stetler for their review and comments on this manuscript. 1. A close look at who is on death row in the United States is a helpful starting point in identifying the population of people who are at issue in this Article. Information compiled by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, as of January 2007, indicates that there were 3350 people under sentence of death in this country. Most of them are men (98%), and 55% of those on death row are people of color (42% African American, 11% Latina/Latino, 1% Native American, and 1% Asian). DEBORAH FINS, NAACP LEGAL DEF. & EDUC. FUND, DEATH Row U.S.A. 1 (2007). Poverty and exposure to trauma are almost universal facts among the life histories of people on death row. Russell Stetler, Mitigation Evidence in Death Penalty Cases, CHAMPION, Jan.-Feb. 1999, at 35, 36- 37. Many clients also have multi-generational family histories of mental illness, and themselves suffer from mental illness. Id. at 36.

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