It has been theorized that American culture is so individualistic that it compels defense attorneys in capital cases to rely upon and reinforce the very individualism that sustains the death penalty. Yet, stories also have the potential to be subversive, and because mitigation is specifically designed to present a contextualized view of a defendant and his or her social history, mitigation seems especially poised to offer a challenge to the hegemonic worldview that privileges individualistic causal explanations. Yet, the subversive potential of capital mitigation has never been examined. This study attempts to bridge this gap in the literature by analyzing eight mitigation cases from Delaware. The results confirm that while defense attorneys do utilize and reinforce individualistic causal explanations, most of them also attempted contextualizing stories that subverted the dominant cultural narrative, indicating that capital mitigation is an arena of social contest where both hegemonic and subversive stories can be told. The implications and limitations of these findings are discussed.
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