As the senior mitigation specialist, Betsy closely supervises and is involved with every aspect of Sage’s mitigation investigations. She is one of the most experienced mitigation specialists in the country, and has a mastery of the ever-changing laws regarding death penalty sentencing and the best practices and science affecting sentencing advocacy.

Betsy has been working in death penalty defense since graduating from Harvard Law School in 1998, and is licensed to practice law in New York and Illinois. In her two decades of practice as an attorney and mitigation specialist she has attended more than 40 conferences related to capital defense, legal developments, mitigation investigation, mental illness, trauma, and intellectual disability.

Betsy has conducted life-history investigations in more than 80 cases, including more than 50 capital cases. She has worked in federal and state jurisdictions across the country, and at all phases of the proceedings, including pre-authorization, trial, state post-conviction, federal habeas, and executive clemency.

Betsy is nationally recognized as an expert in the field of mitigation. She has presented on topics related to death penalty defense and mitigation at more than 25 conferences across the country. She designed and coordinated two national conferences: the National Alliance for Sentencing Advocacy, and Mitigation Specialist’s Annual Sentence Advocacy Training, and a five-part series of webinars for lawyers, mitigation specialists, and investigators defending juvenile-life cases presented by the National Association for Public Defense. She designed and presented training for two public defenders’ offices, and co-designed and coordinated a national conference on intellectual disability in death penalty cases.