Nine prisoners have been executed in the United States in 2023, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Yet the number of death sentences in the country has steadily decreased in recent decades, from more than 300 annually in the mid-1990s to fewer than 30 in recent years. This is thanks, in part, to the work of a small group of little-known professionals known as mitigation specialists. Their mission? Mercy.

Sara Baldwin is a mitigation specialist in Florida. Her job is to dig deep into the lives of people who commit murder, to find out who they were before they committed a terrible crime, and how they become the kind of person who would. Mitigation specialists do this in order to convince juries, judges and prosecutors to bestow mercy — often in the form of a life sentence instead of a death sentence.

Maurice Chammah, staff writer at The Marshall Project, spent three years shadowing Sara Baldwin and her work on a particular case. Both join us for this conversation. 

Read Maurice's latest piece about Sara's work for The Marshall Project: "The Mercy Workers."