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Elizabeth Vartkessian works with criminal defense teams as a mitigation specialist. She isn't part of an Innocence Project; her clients are legally guilty, 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. Her unique experience has taught her that when personal or generational trauma enters the body, it finds its way out eventually, sometimes through violence.

It was a clash of race, privilege, and circumstance when Alan Robertson first signed up through a church program to visit Cecil Johnson on Death Row, to offer friendship and compassion. Alan's wife Suzanne had no intention of being involved, but slowly, through phone calls and letters, she began to empathize and understand him. That Cecil and Suzanne eventually became such close friends—a white middle-class woman and a Black man who grew up devoid of advantage—is a testament to perseverance, forgiveness, and love, but also to the notion that differences don't have to be barriers.

The twenty-one years that kept Rob separated from his wife, Fox, and their six sons was long enough. As Rob survived two decades at America's bloodiest penitentiary and Fox raised their sons solo, they never stopped fighting for Rob's freedom and for their futures against the statistical odds. All the while, it was love that carried them through.