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In Florida, a woman was assigned to dig into the past of such an inmate. She found a beat cop like an older Italian guy who described constant violence and the way he was sort of pity the kids who were growing up there. He said, my cousin, he's a model tragedy in black American life. This is what Rikers and sending people to prison to young does to them and it's a tragedy.

Should past trauma prevent a convicted killer from being executed? The Marshall Project’s Maurice Chammah reports on “mitigation specialists” who try to save the lives of death row inmates by investigating their histories.

This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Matt Collette, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King.

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