Is There a Death Penalty?

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Veltra Baldwin spent two weeks in Jacksonville, Florida every day from roughly nine to five going into this courtroom and just watching this trial play out. The first couple of days I was watching jury selections and you saw a real reckoning. You really got the sense that the process offers the victim family very little beyond the promise of a harsher punishment. But at least one juror finds that the mitigating factors outweigh the aggravating factors so he's not going to get death.

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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