Emerging Trends in Veteran Mitigation

Join us for an insightful webinar on the critical role of mitigation in advocating for veterans facing criminal charges. Veterans often bring unique circumstances and experiences that must be carefully considered in a case, especially when prosecutors attempt to minimize their military service or dehumanize them as defendants. This panel will provide practical strategies for defense practitioners to discuss mental health, jury selection, or other challenges and highlight the significance of a veteran’s service and effectively humanize their clients to achieve equitable outcomes.

This webinar will be building on the ideas discussed in the webinar titled, Representing Veterans in Capital Cases: Special Issues in Investigating and Presenting Veterans’ Mitigation. You can access a recording of the previous webinar here.

Art Cody

Captain Art Cody, USN (Retired) is the Director of the Center for Veteran Criminal Advocacy.  His military career spans over thirty years and he has served worldwide. Art began his career as an Army helicopter pilot followed by a similar role in the Navy Reserve flying for a Strike Rescue/Special Operations Squadron. He served aboard USS Enterprise (CVN-65) in the initial response to the 9-11 attacks and was most recently deployed to Afghanistan as the Staff Director of the Rule of Law Section, US Embassy Kabul.  As a civilian lawyer, Art has represented capital clients for over twenty-five years. Art is a former chair of the Capital Punishment Committee of the New York City Bar Association.   He frequently presents nationally on the defense of veterans, provides counsel to lawyers for capitally charged or sentenced veterans, and served as lead counsel in a veteran capital clemency hearing.  In 2020, he assisted Advancing Real Change and the Southern Center for Human Rights in obtaining clemency in Georgia for Jimmy Meders, an Army veteran.   In addition to an Aerospace Engineering degree from West Point, he graduated magna cum laude from Notre Dame Law School where he was the Executive Editor of the Notre Dame Law Review and founded the Notre Dame Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. He is a recipient of the New York City Bar Association’s Thurgood Marshall Award for Capital Representation and the New York State Bar Association’s 2019 David S. Michaels Award for his representation of veterans in Criminal Courts. His military decorations include the Navy Bronze Star Medal, Meritorious Service Medal, Naval Aviator Badge, Army Parachutist Badge and the German Armed Forces Parachutist Badge.  Additionally, he received the State Department’s Meritorious Honor Award for his service in Kabul.

Mikel Matto

Mikel Matto, MD is a clinical professor of Psychiatry at University of California San Francisco (UCSF) and Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) where he teaches medical students, residents, fellows, and allied health professionals.  He is Medical Director of both the OHSU Intercultural Psychiatry Program and the Torture Treatment Center of Oregon.

Dr. Matto is a forensic psychiatrist specializing in the field of trauma and PTSD.  He has testified on this topics in high profile cases in civil, county, state, federal, and military legal systems.  He authored a landmark article on detection of false PTSD which was selected as one of the set of articles for used testing of psychiatrists for their maintenance of board certification.  He has acted as advisor and consultant to attorneys and organizations on the topic of trauma nationally and internationally (including for several years at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba).  Dr. Matto is active in the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, where he serves as Chair for the Committee for Trauma and Stress and the Chair for the Committee for Human Rights and National Security.  Dr. Matto served in the Army reserve corps for 12 years, including as State Psychiatrist for the California Army National Guard.

Shawn Vincent

Shawn Vincent is a jury and media management consultant at VM Litigation, where he has served both civil litigators and criminal defense lawyers, including lawyers representing capitally charged veterans.

Robert Dunham

Robert Dunham is the founder and Director of the Death Penalty Policy Project, an adjunct professor teaching death penalty law at the Temple University Beasley School of Law, and Special Counsel to the national non-profit law practice at Phillips Black, Inc. Before returning home to Pennsylvania in 2023, he served eight years as Executive Director of the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center.

Nationally recognized as an expert on capital punishment, Rob has taught in death penalty training programs and testified in legislative hearings across the country for more than three decades. Prior to joining DPIC in March 2015, he was one of the leading capital appeal lawyers in Pennsylvania, arguing on behalf of the Commonwealth’s death-row prisoners in its state and federal courts and in the United States Supreme Court.

Rob’s capital case litigation experience includes serving as Executive Director of the former Pennsylvania Capital Case Resource Center from 1994 to 1999; Director of Training of the Capital Habeas Unit of the Philadelphia federal defender’s office from 1999 to 2009; and as an assistant federal defender in the Harrisburg federal defender’s capital habeas unit from 2009 until he joined DPIC. Collectively, those offices overturned more than 150 unconstitutionally imposed death sentences, against just three executions — all of mentally ill prisoners who waived their appeals. Rob started his legal career as a litigation associate at Schnader, Harrison, Segal & Lewis in Philadelphia, where he handled his first pro bono capital case.

Rob is a member of the Board of Directors of the death-row exoneree organization, Witness to Innocence and has served on the Steering Committee of the American Bar Association’s Death Penalty Representation Project and on the board of directors of the Pennsylvania Innocence Project and the Pennsylvania Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. From 2004 until 2015, he was an adjunct professor of law at Villanova Law School, where he taught the school’s death penalty seminar and death penalty practicum. He currently serves as a consultant to the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, for whom he produces Death Row USA, the organization’s quarterly census of U.S. death row.