Thoughtfully
Tailored Services
Every case is unique, and our services reflect that. We offer a wide range of resources that are thoughtfully designed to meet the unique needs of your case.
Areas of Practice
Depending on your case’s posture, your office might qualify for training and consulting services free of charge. Contact us to learn more.
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Record Collection and Analysis
Atkins Investigations
Comprehensive Life History Investigations
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Life History Report Development
Trauma-Informed Consultations for Client-Team Dynamic Concerns
Cultural or Communication Barriers
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An Introduction to Culturally-Responsive Care
Atkins Investigation in Capital Cases
Signs and Symptoms of Serious Mental Illness in Capital Representation
Trauma-Informed Care and Culturally-Responsive Practices and Interviewing
Direct Representation
Life history records are the backbone of a thorough, compelling, and accurate mitigation investigation. WMC can assist the team by solely focusing on identifying, requesting, and digesting life history records for your client and key witnesses into the case Master Documents, including a People List, Social Chronology, Investigation Plan, and Record Digest. Through these tasks, new mitigation themes will emerge, additional witnesses will be identified, and the client’s story will be better understood through the lens of time-stamped, documented observations from those within and out of the client’s family.
Record Collection and Analysis
A client’s diagnosed intellectual disability, defined by the DSM-5-TR, can be the difference between your client facing the death penalty or being constitutionally barred from facing capital charges with the passing of Atkins v. Virgina and more recently in Texas, Moore v. Texas. Unfortunately, identifying whether your client has an intellectual disability isn’t always easy, due to mild deficits, lack of a prior diagnoses, and masking — among other complications. WMC has specialized, clinical experience serving clients with intellectual disabilities and successfully helped defense teams get death waivers, execution dates stayed, and death sentences commuted to life.
Atkins Investigations
A constitutionally compliant mitigation investigation set forth by the 4th and 8th amendments requires that a defense team completes an independent life history investigation for the client and their family members that goes back three generations. This includes extensive interviews of client, identifying and interviewing life history witness who have known the client and their family, including neighbors, teachers, and previous mental health providers, among others, and collecting all records that have been generated for the client and their family during the course of their lives.
Comprehensive Life History Investigations
Consultation
Even the most experienced teams benefit from a fresh set of eyes. Mitigation consultants offer high-level, strategic support to help assess the broader picture of a case—particularly in identifying themes related to mental illness, intellectual disability, and generational trauma. We can help your team:
Identify mitigation themes and strategize how to further develop them
Communicate best practices in mitigation to judges and decision-makers (e.g., funding needs, continuance necessities, or removing the death penalty from consideration)
Review and suggest edits to strengthen social history reports for clarity, cohesion, and narrative impact
Identify gaps in investigation and new areas to explore
Navigate cultural or communication barriers with clients and witnesses
Coordinate research on nuanced mitigation issues, including lead poisoning, community statistics, and environmental racism
Contextualize aggravating factors from a mental health or trauma perspective
Recommend appropriate experts for the case
Support the design and interpretation of juror focus studies
Note: Mitigation consultants do not engage in direct client contact or representation.
Training
This interactive training explores key definitions and how the concepts interact with the criminal legal system, particularly regarding the disproportionate incarceration of Black and Latinx people. Participants will explore how personal and client cultural identities shape our specific experiences, communication patterns and team dynamics. We will discuss how to build a client-centered practice that explores our clients’ cultural identities and minimizes power imbalances. We’ll also provide tools for addressing client-initiated conversations about race, preventing team-splitting, and building rapport with clients who have been historically marginalized. Participants will leave with practical strategies for rebuilding trust after client-team ruptures and showing up in ways that are culturally attuned, curious, and compassionate.
An Introduction to
Culturally-Responsive Care
Trauma impacts our ability to form healthy, trusting relationships with others, which is central to the work of criminal defense teams. Black and Latinx people are 5 and 1.5 times more likely to be arrested than white people—making culturally responsive, trauma-informed care not just helpful, but essential. The first part of this interactive training explores how trauma impacts one’s emotions, behavior, psychological functioning and introduces evidenced-based tools grounded in the Five Pillars of Trauma-Informed Care to strengthen trust, connection, and advocacy with our clients.
The second part of this training series addresses trauma-informed interviewing techniques that criminal defense practitioners can use when facing trauma-induced client-team dynamics including team splitting, emotional dysregulation, client reluctance/resistance, and appeals waiving (for capital cases). In addition, ideas on addressing a client’s cultural, racial, and gender needs within these trauma-induced dynamics will be addressed. At the end of this training, attendees will feel more confident applying this framework during their next client meeting and empowered to have conversations with the broader team about how this framework promotes their client’s humanity, sense of solidarity with their defense team, and overall client outcomes.
Trauma-Informed Care and Culturally-Responsive Practices and Interviewing
Atkins investigations require specialized skills in identifying adaptive deficits and corroborating them with members of the client’s community. Unfortunately, there are many barriers in uncovering evidence of these deficits, and one must possess the skills necessary to do so in a society where intellectual disabilities are often sources of stigma, shame, or character flaws. This interactive training defines intellectual disability (formerly known as 'mental retardation') based on current DSM-5-TR standards and explores how to effectively identify signs that your client might have an intellectual disability. Participants have the opportunity to practice issue-spotting these symptoms in records and witness interview vignettes. Challenges related to Atkins investigations are also explored, including individual and community masking, chronic incarceration, mental health comorbidities, poverty, and extraneous offenses. After this training, participants feel more confident in recognizing the warning signs of ID and be able to assist their teams in identifying records and witnesses needed to effectively investigate the diagnosis.
Atkins Investigations
Between 60 - 70% of incarcerated people have a mental illness, and research suggests this number might be lacking. Untreated mental illness impacts a client’s ability to maintain relationships with others and cope with adverse experiences. Being able to identify the signs and symptoms of a client’s mental illness can help contextualize the client’s life experiences for decision-makers and provide a full picture of the client’s functioning. Participants will leave this training feeling confident in how to identify signs of mental illness in records and interviews.