Program Summary:
Join author and Advancing Real Change Executive Director Liz Vartkessian, and Steve Bright, former director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, for an engaging discussion of Vartkessian’s book, The Deserving: What the Lives of the Condemned Reveal About American Justice and the role we all play in attempting to create a more humane criminal legal system.
DATE: Thursday, July 9, 2026
TIME: 3:00-4:00pm EST
COST: FREE (registration is required)*
LOCATION: Zoom link will be sent after registration
Faculty:
Steve Bright
Steve Bright teaches at the law schools at Yale and Georgetown Universities. He is co-author, with James Kwak, of The Fear of Too Much Justice: Race, Poverty, and the Persistence of Inequality in the Criminal Courts (2023). He spent 34 years at the Southern Center for Human Rights, first as director and later as president and senior counsel. While there, he tried capital cases before juries and argued cases in the state and federal appellate courts, including four capital cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court reversed all four, finding racial discrimination during jury selection in three and that the client was improperly denied an expert witness on mental health issues in the fourth. He received the American Bar Association’s Thurgood Marshall Award in 1998.
Liz Vartkessian
Elizabeth Vartkessian has been investigating the life histories of those facing the most severe penalties possible in the United States since 2004, having worked in the following jurisdictions: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota. After starting a successful private practice and obtaining her Ph.D. in Law from the University of Oxford, Liz and several colleagues created Advancing Real Change, Inc. (ARC, Inc.) a national nonprofit with offices in Baltimore, MD; Jacksonville, FL; and Birmingham, AL dedicated to conducting high-quality life history investigations in criminal cases. She is an expert on the collection and effective presentation of mitigating evidence, as well as the standard of care required by the defense in death penalty and juvenile cases.
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