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Join the Invisible Institute for a conversation around The Deserving: What the Lives of the Condemned Reveal About American Justice with the author and mitigation specialist Elizabeth Vartkessian. Elizabeth isn't part of the Innocence Project; her clients are often legally guilty, and often of terrible crimes. Rather, her job is to spend hundreds of hours per case talking to the parents, siblings, teachers, and neighbors of a defendant, situating their crimes in context. The Deserving challenges us to move beyond dominant narratives about criminality and rehabilitation into a deeper understanding of accountability.

About Elizabeth Vartkessian

Mitigation specialist Elizabeth Vartkessian has been investigating the life histories of those facing the most severe penalties possible in the United States since 2004. She is the author of The Deserving: What the Lives of the Condemned Reveal About American Justice published by Bloomsbury in January 2026. Elizabeth holds a PhD in law and an MS in comparative social policy from the University of Oxford, and BAs in philosophy and political science from the George Washington University. She is the founder and executive director of Advancing Real Change Inc., a national nonprofit dedicated to conducting life history investigations in criminal cases. She lives in Baltimore.

About Invisible Institute

The Invisible Institute is a journalism production organization on the South Side of Chicago. We work to enhance the capacity of citizens to hold public institutions accountable. Among the tactics we employ are investigative reporting, multimedia storytelling, human rights documentation, the curation of public information, and the orchestration of difficult public conversations. Our work coheres around a central principle: we as citizens have co-responsibility with the government for maintaining respect for human rights and, when abuses occur, for demanding redress.The Invisible Institute formed to combat official secrecy by ensuring the public has access to police misconduct records and rigorous reporting, both crucial for communities to be able to challenge state-sanctioned violence. For nearly a decade, our founder Jamie Kalven reported from within high-rise public housing. Jamie’s journalism sparked a series of federal civil rights lawsuits, including a landmark 2014 case, Kalven v. Chicago, which made police misconduct records public across Illinois. The Invisible Institute formed and launched the Civic Police Data Project (CPDP.co) one year later, making hundreds of thousands of police records widely available. The power of our reporting has been repeatedly recognized by our peers. Our fifteen-person newsroom has won three Pulitzer Prizes for our reporting on race and the criminal justice system. Our work continues to be centered on Black neighborhoods on the South and West Sides of Chicago—the communities most acutely affected by patterns of abusive, unconstitutional policing.