Scharlette Holdman, whose pioneering work with defense lawyers contributed to the decline of the death penalty nationwide, and whose clients included Ted Kaczynski, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, died Wednesday. She was 70.
In the tight-knit world of defense lawyers who focus on the death penalty, Holdman was a revered figure, a non-lawyer responsible for the development of mitigating evidence, aimed at convincing jurors to spare the lives of men and women whose crimes, at first blush, only elicited disgust. It is now common practice for capital defense lawyers to hire “mitigation specialists,” and in recent years such evidence has often convinced district attorneys not to seek the death penalty in the first place.
[For more of this story, written by Maurice Chammah, go to https://www.themarshallproject...=hp-3-112#.sMTYsChGa]
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