Every Defendant Has a Story: Understanding Is Not Excusing

In a courtroom, a human being can become a noun.

The defendant. The perpetrator. The offender. The accused.

Sometimes the noun becomes even narrower than that. A person who has lived twenty, thirty, forty or sixty years can become identified almost entirely with the worst minutes of his or her life. The crime can eclipse the person who committed it.

That may be understandable. When a crime is violent, particularly when its consequences are devastating, the facts can be so disturbing that they seem to demand our entire attention. Victims and their families deserve to have the gravity of what happened fully recognized. Nothing about understanding the person who committed a violent act requires diminishing the suffering of the person against whom that violence was directed.

But justice asks us to do something extraordinarily difficult: to hold more than one truth in mind at the same time.

A person can be responsible for a terrible act and still be a human being whose life has a story. Understanding that story does not mean excusing the act. It means refusing to pretend that human behavior emerges from nowhere.

Explanation Is Not Exoneration

After 25 years practicing psychiatry, I do not believe people are born evil. I believe people are born into circumstances. They are born with particular temperaments and vulnerabilities. They encounter parents, siblings, neighborhoods, schools, losses, humiliations, illnesses, traumas, opportunities and disappointments. They form beliefs about themselves and other people. They develop ways of protecting themselves psychologically. Some of those ways of adapting are healthy. Others can become profoundly destructive.

None of this erases personal responsibility.

It does, however, provide context.

That distinction—between explaining behavior and excusing behavior—is one of the most important distinctions in the psychological understanding of criminal cases. To explain how someone arrived at a terrible moment is not to declare that the moment was inevitable, acceptable or justified. It is to recognize that the defendant standing before a jury did not suddenly materialize on the day of the alleged offense.

There was a life before that day.

And sometimes that life matters enormously.

The Story Behind the Crime

I have had the honor of presenting life-story narratives concerning defendants to dozens of juries. The purpose has never been to ask jurors to forget what happened. It has been to help them understand who it happened through.

That requires much more than assembling a chronology.

A meaningful psychological narrative connects the events of a person’s life. It looks for the experiences that shaped identity, attachment, fear, anger, self-esteem and judgment. It asks what happened to this person, what he came to believe about himself and others, how he learned to respond to threat or rejection, what losses he endured, what psychological defenses he developed and how those forces may have converged at a critical moment.

Medical and psychiatric records may matter. School records may matter. Family history may matter. Childhood experiences may matter. Relationships, abandonment, addiction, trauma, failure, success, shame and grief may all matter. Sometimes something that appears almost incidental in a file turns out to be a thread that runs through an entire life.

The task is not to manufacture sympathy. It is to uncover truth.

When that work is done carefully, the defendant can begin to emerge from behind the accusation as a three-dimensional human being.

From Perpetrator to Person

Trials necessarily focus attention on acts. Psychology can help restore attention to the person who performed them.

That distinction can be profound.

Without a life narrative, jurors may see a photograph, hear evidence about an act and encounter a defendant sitting silently at counsel table. Their understanding of that person may therefore be dominated by the conduct described in the courtroom.

A carefully developed life narrative widens the lens.

The jury may come to understand that the individual before them was once a child. That child had experiences. Those experiences had consequences. The adult developed strengths and weaknesses, attachments and fears, aspirations and failures. Choices were made along the way, including choices for which that person may bear responsibility. But the final act was part of a human trajectory rather than an inexplicable eruption of evil.

This is not sleight of hand. In my view, it is precisely the opposite. It is an effort to replace a caricature with a person.

The Power of Narrative in the Courtroom

Human beings understand one another through stories. We instinctively look for beginnings, turning points, causes, conflicts and consequences. A collection of facts may tell us what happened. A coherent narrative can help us understand how a human being arrived there.

That is why psychological narrative can be so important to litigation strategy, particularly in cases involving mitigation and sentencing.

The strongest narratives are not sentimental. They do not strain for absolution. In fact, credibility can be damaged when an advocate appears to be asking jurors to deny the undeniable.

A powerful narrative can acknowledge responsibility where responsibility exists while insisting upon something equally important: the worst thing a human being has ever done is not necessarily the sum total of that human being.

Those two propositions can coexist.

A person may have caused immense harm.

That person may also have been harmed.

A person may have made an indefensible choice.

There may still be a psychologically comprehensible path that led to that choice.

A person may deserve consequences.

That person may still deserve to be understood.

Seeing the Whole Human Being

One of the privileges of my career has been the opportunity to tell these stories in courtrooms. I have watched jurors encounter defendants differently once they understood something about the lives behind the charges. Not necessarily more leniently. Not necessarily less painfully. But more completely.

That matters because justice should be capable of seeing an entire human being.

For attorneys representing clients accused or convicted of serious crimes, the psychological narrative should therefore never be an afterthought. It can require the same degree of investigation, analysis and preparation devoted to any other consequential part of the case.

There is almost always a story beneath the story.

Finding it requires listening carefully enough to hear what others may have missed, reviewing a life rather than merely reviewing a file, and understanding that human behavior—even terrible human behavior—has antecedents.

Those antecedents do not erase responsibility.

They reveal humanity.

And when someone’s liberty, future or life itself is being weighed, I believe that humanity deserves to be seen.