NEW YORK — In the tight-knit world of defense lawyers who focus on the death penalty, Scharlette Holdman, who died on July 12 at 70, was a revered figure, a nonlawyer who taught her peers how to persuade jurors and prosecutors to spare the lives of men and women convicted of heinous crimes.
Her clients included Ted Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber; Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston Marathon bomber; and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the Al Qaeda operative accused of orchestrating the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
In dozens of lesser-known cases, she immersed herself in the biographies of each defendant, examining family histories that went back several generations and unearthing painful memories of trauma and abuse as she helped their lawyers argue for life sentences.
Defense lawyers have long looked to gain sympathy for their clients in order to alleviate punishment, but Dr. Holdman was one of the first to go deeper, scraping for every medical, educational, and legal record she could find and spending hours with a client to trace the path to the crime.
The methods she helped develop are now enshrined in the American Bar Association’s guidelines for death penalty defense lawyers. It is now common practice for these lawyers to hire a “mitigation specialist’’ — a term coined by Dr. Holdman — and in recent years the evidence these specialists have gathered has often persuaded district attorneys not to seek the death penalty.
In legal circles, the work of Dr. Holdman and those who have followed in her footsteps has been widely credited as an important factor in the decline of the death penalty nationwide, from more than 300 death sentences per year in the mid-1990s to 30 in 2016.
“Scharlette’s guiding hand, drive to understand the influences that shaped each individual’s life, and pushing legal teams to gain a deep understanding of those influences contributed to the resolution of many cases,’’ said Judy Clarke, a criminal defense lawyer who worked with Dr. Holdman on several high-profile cases.
A friend, Denny LeBoeuf, said Dr. Holdman died of cancer in New Orleans, where she had been living.
A native of Memphis, Dr. Holdman obtained her doctrate from the University of Hawaii.
She ran several chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union in the 1970s, a period when the US Supreme Court struck down death penalty laws, and state legislatures raced to rewrite them.
The court restored capital punishment in 1976, but in doing so, it ruled that those who sentenced people to death must be able to consider “compassionate or mitigating factors stemming from the diverse frailties of humankind.’’
As the number of death row prisoners grew, Dr. Holdman took a job to run the Florida Clearinghouse on Criminal Justice in Tallahassee, where she tried to find lawyers for convicts as their execution dates approached.
“She was like a medic performing triage at a train wreck,’’ wrote the journalist David Von Drehle in profiling Dr. Holdman for his book “Among the Lowest of the Dead: The Culture of Death Row.’’ “The first job was to determine who was closest to dying.’’
Dr. Holdman was famous for cajoling lawyers into taking on death-row appeals. She worked around the clock for $600 a month while raising two children, surviving on fast-food fried chicken, coffee, cigarettes and jug wine, all the while gaining a nickname in the Florida press: “Mistress of Delay.’’
