NAPD 2025 Team Mitigation Institute

During this session, we will discuss with impacted persons way they are directing their lived experience to help others that have or are being impacted by the legal system. By the end of this session, you will have a better understanding how to involve those impacted by the legal system into your practice and how to utilize their skills to achieve better outcomes for the people we represent.

Humans use stories to make choices and justify actions. This is especially true in criminal justice, where participants automatically use stereotyping and unconscious bias on a case. This course reveals the powerful story dynamics impacting mitigation and shows how storytelling techniques saves time and effort while creating maximum impact in advocating for marginalized clients.

• What are the types of story-based biases involved in mitigation?
• What elements in mitigation are story-like, and what elements are not?
• What is the “epiphany" and why is it so powerful?
• How can you use storytelling technique to create a compelling case?

This course will answer these and other questions, covering practical storytelling techniques that you can use to create empathy and create action on your client's behalf.

Target Audience
• Criminal justice workers representing clients from marginalized populations.
• Attorneys needing to argue a case before a jury or in mitigation.
• Social workers advocating for a client’s sentencing or creating mitigation memos.

Course Values
• Empathy creates action.
• Stories and storytelling are integral to our lives.
• The justice system’s inherent biases can be corrected via storytelling.

Learning Objectives
• Understand how story creates systemic bias
• Learn the basic mechanisms of storytelling
• Explore how to apply storytelling technique in mitigation
• Use storytelling techniques to create empathy and action