Ask a Mitigation Specialist – March 18

All timeslots have been reserved for this call. Check our calendar for next month’s Ask a Mitigation Specialist.

Please only sign up for AMS if you can commit to attending, as this helps us and our advisors manage scheduling and keeps spots available for those who can fully participate. If an emergency or unexpected conflict arises, please notify us as soon as possible so we can adjust plans and honor the time our volunteer advisors generously offer.

If you need to speak with an Advisor but are unavailable during core Ask A Mitigation Specialist hours (3 p.m.–5:10 p.m. ET), or if you are an international practitioner who can only meet outside the times offered, please contact Reginald Lanier at [email protected]. We will do our best to accommodate requests outside of standard hours; however, availability for such calls cannot be guaranteed.

Dana Cook

Dana L. Cook, MSW, is the Director of Social Services Training and Recruitment at the Defender Association of Philadelphia after returning to the Homicide Unit in that office in July of 2023. From March of 2020 to May of 2023, she served as the National Mitigation Coordinator for the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel Projects, where she developed and ran national capital defense training programs, consulted with defense teams, and provided expert declarations and testimony on the standard of care in mitigation investigations in capital cases. In 2010, she co-founded the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation (ACCR) and served as its co-director for ten years. ACCR is a resource center that provides trial-level consultation and training in death penalty and juvenile life without parole cases in Pennsylvania. She was a mitigation specialist in the Juvenile Special Defense Unit and the Homicide Unit from 2003-2010. Prior to that, she was an investigator in the Capital Habeas Unit of the Federal Community Defender Office in Philadelphia. She began her career as an investigator at the Post-Conviction Defender Office in Nashville, TN. She received her B.S. in Criminal Justice Administration in 1996 from Middle Tennessee State University and her MSW from the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania in 2003.

Danalynn Recer

Danalynn Recer began fighting the death penalty in Texas three decades ago, working initially as an investigator and later as an attorney with the Texas Resource Center. In 1995, she moved to New Orleans to work with Clive Stafford Smith at the Louisiana Crisis Assistance Center, nationally known for its aggressive and creative capital trial representation. While there, she participated in a dozen capital trials, secured life pleas for another 8 clients, and directed the Jefferson Parish Project, a consulting team that worked with the highest volume of indigent defenders in Louisiana to reduce the number of death sentences there. In 2002, Danalynn stepped in on a pro bono basis and founded the Gulf Region Advocacy Center (GRACE) in the process. Since then, GRACE’s retrial/resentencing project has secured sentences of life or better for over two dozen former death row inmates.  Today, GRACE provides direct representation, consulting services, and mitigation services to indigent capital defendants, as well as training and education to capital defenders around the country. Over the past thirty-two years, Danalynn has participated in the defense of over one hundred capital clients in all stages of litigation in state and federal courts in Texas, Louisiana, Georgia, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Michigan, Tennessee, North Dakota, Florida, Kansas, Virginia, California, Missouri, Nevada, and Massachusetts. She holds a B.A., M.A., and J.D. from the University of Texas.