True stories build bridges

The criminal legal system too often causes more harm than it repairs. Many decision-makers – such as judges, juries, and prosecutors – consider only the crime and ignore the accused person’s redeeming qualities, the community that cares for them, their experiences, and their potential for growth. This leads to sentences that are excessive, capricious, and discriminatory and that contribute to the current epidemic of mass incarceration in the United States. To achieve truly just outcomes, the full, true story of a person’s life must be told. This is the heart of our work.

Detailed information about the lives of individuals accused of crimes – called “mitigating evidence” – can help decision-makers understand their full personhood and particular circumstances and choose more humane sentences. This work involves many hundreds of hours meeting with our clients, interviewing scores of witnesses, and collecting records to develop an accurate, detailed, multi-dimensional account of the client’s life.

Every individual deserves the opportunity to have their history heard when facing the loss of life or liberty. Sharing this evidence can dramatically change individual outcomes for the better and reduce mass incarceration.

Advancing Real Change, Inc., provides direct services as members of defense teams to people facing extreme sentences and trains defenders throughout the country. We use our knowledge, grounded in practice and research, to instigate systemic change in partnership with experts, practitioners, and community members.

Direct Mitigation Services: Our staff members serve as mitigation specialists on criminal defense teams for poor clients across the country. The evidence we unearth is shared with decision-makers, leading to more humane sentences based on a full understanding of our clients’ lives and allowing us to create re-entry plans that respond to a client’s true needs. Because of our work, more than 90% of our clients have avoided the worst potential outcomes in their cases. They have their full lives ahead of them and the potential for growth and change. Some have and will one day return to their communities.

Training and Education: Effectively collecting mitigating evidence and developing true, detailed life histories is painstaking and requires significant skill and training. Advancing Real Change, Inc., is a leading provider of training and support to a growing community of defense team members across the country. We do this through in-person and virtual training events, online resources, and consulting. We provide these services free of charge in order to ensure that every person facing the loss of their life or liberty has a skilled team of defenders advocating for them. Fees for high-quality legal education can also limit the professional diversity our clients need for effective representation. Our no-cost trainings remove that barrier. Our training and education offerings have been accessed by more than 2,500 practitioners.

Learn more about our Training and Education program.

Mitigation and system change: Advancing Real Change, Inc., is building a coalition of defenders and advocates that understand the value of mitigation and the way that developing and sharing true life histories fosters empathy and human dignity in the criminal legal system. Mitigation provides a path toward a deeper understanding, not only of individuals and their unique histories, but also of how our collective social systems fail and how these failures lead to harm.