How Charlie Kirk's alleged assassin Tyler Robinson has enlisted team of 'mercy investigators' to help him dodge death penalty

Tyler Robinson, the man accused of killing Charlie Kirk, is slated for his first major hearing next month, flanked by a crack legal team focused partly on avoiding a guilty verdict – but mainly on keeping him alive.

Much of that task hinges on a little-known kind of 'mercy investigator' who only works on capital cases. 

Mitigation specialists, as they’re known, work behind the scenes gathering facts about their clients’ lives in a bid to convince juries to spare them from death sentences and choose life imprisonment instead.

In Robinson’s case – the highest profile assassination of our time – his team started combing for that evidence shortly after his arrest last fall and is expected to continue doing so for at least another year before a jury is even seated.

Their research likely involves constructing his detailed life history, documenting his mental health and digging up past abuse or traumas, researching his family dynamics and relationships with friends and lovers and showing how growing up online and playing video games may have damaged his brain.

But mitigation isn’t all sob stories. It will likely also highlight ways Robinson may have done some good in his life, regardless of the gruesome murder he’s accused of.

Looking for anything that might prompt empathy among jurors, these so-called ‘mercy investigators’ are driven by one core principle: that we are all more than the worst thing we may have ever done.

'While the work of a prosecutor is to show this defendant on the worst day of his life, the work of mitigation specialists is to show jurors all the other days – not to excuse their conduct, but to help jurors understand it and see that he is human just like the rest of us,' said Corinna Barrett Lain of the University of Richmond School of Law who has spent 18 years studying the death penalty. 

‘In many ways, they’re the single most important members of a capital defense team.’

‘To me, Tyler Robinson's story is one we don’t really know yet,’ added John Blume, a lawyer who has been defending capital cases since the mid-1980s. 

‘It’s up to his mitigation specialists to fill in those blanks.’

Robinson, 23, stands accused of gunning down Kirk on September 10 last year while the controversial conservative activist and Turning Point USA founder was speaking in front of a large crowd at Utah Valley University.

If convicted, Robinson could face death by firing squad.

He has spent the last nine months in a Provo jail with little to no contact with other inmates. His main interactions are with members of his legal team, a psychological evaluator and corrections officers who deliver meal trays to his cell, sources told the Daily Mail. 

At his preliminary hearing scheduled to start July 6, prosecutors are expected to detail Robinson’s apparent confession to his father and text messages to his transgender lover and roommate, Lance Twiggs, stating, 'It was me at UVU yesterday. I'm sorry for all of this.’ 

Among the other evidence against him includes DNA found on a rifle left at the crime scene and a note found on his keyboard reading, ‘I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk and I'm going to take it.’

‘The evidence seems pretty overwhelming that Mr Robinson committed this offense. That makes focusing on the sentencing phase and trying to humanize him all the more important,’ said Blume, who is not working on the case.

Robinson’s lawyers are seeking to delay next month’s hearing in a tactic commonly used by capital defenders to buy time for detailed mitigation research, which generally takes at least two years. 

The mercy investigators, who are funded by Utah taxpayers, are essentially a defense dream team, legal experts said.  

Robinson’s lead counsel, Utah-based Kathryn Nester, defended Kouri Richins, the mother accused of poisoning her husband and later writing a children's book about grief. 

Among his death-penalty defense experts are California lawyer Michael Burt, who represented Lyle Menendez and also worked on the defenses of serial killer Richard Ramirez and Olympic Park bombing defendant Eric Rudolph. 

The others on the team specialize in the complex procedural requirements unique to capital cases, including forensic evidence, jury selection, constitutional challenges, ways to preserve Robinson’s future right to appeal and mitigation research.

When asked by the Daily Mail, Robinson’s lawyers wouldn’t say how many mitigation specialists are investigating his case nor who they are, citing ethical standards, rules of professional conduct and court orders prohibiting them from speaking with the news media.

The obscure work of mitigation research originated after 1976 when the Supreme Court, overturning a 1972 decision outlawing the death penalty, let executions resume under the condition that jurors must be able to look at convicts as individuals and consider ‘compassionate or mitigating factors stemming from the diverse frailties of humankind'.

Those factors can be found through the painstaking work of checking defendants’ medical, school, social service, military and prison records. They are gleaned through extensive interviews with, quite literally, every one of their family members, friends, romantic and sexual partners, coworkers, neighbors, teachers and clergy members. 

And they are culled through hundreds of hours with the defendants themselves, often discussing shameful and otherwise painful parts of their lives that they prefer not to reveal, even if they could save their lives when presented to a jury at the penalty stage of their trials.

'You can’t rely on a client to just come out and say what happened to them. Often they don’t know or can’t articulate the abuses and other very difficult things that shaped their experiences. Building that rapport, that trust doesn’t happen in, like, one visit,' said Liz Vartkessian, a veteran mitigation specialist and author of The Deserving: What the Lives of the Condemned Reveal about American Justice.

Many of her clients, she said, have ‘looked on the outside like they were functioning in healthy ways’, but on the inside were ‘some of the most traumatized, mentally ill people in our communities’.

‘Mitigation specialists go into the darkest corners of our humanity. They go into the places where the defendant wants to forget, the family wants to forget, into the deepest crevices of cruelty and brutality,’ Lain added.

Most avoid media attention even though the information they uncover often makes headlines.

In the case of Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz, for example, Kate O'Shea managed to unearth information that kept him from lethal injection. 

Working 5,000 hours, reading through 8,000 pages of records and interviewing 150 people, she was able to document that, although Cruz had never been evaluated for fetal alcohol spectrum disorder until he had killed 17 people, he had suffered brain damage from his mother drinking virtually every day of the first eight months of her pregnancy. 

For all 17 murder counts, the jury found that aggravating circumstances did not outweigh the mitigating circumstances of Cruz’s brain damage, making him ineligible for death.

Cruz’s life-in-prison sentence outraged many of the victims’ families who said the system failed them.

‘The death penalty is a joke because they’ll just come up with a woe-is-me story to save his tail,’ Andrew Pollack, whose daughter, Meadow, was killed by Cruz at Parkland, said of Robinson. ‘They should just execute that guy and get it over with already.’

From a mitigation standpoint, experts say it may help Robinson’s case that he was 22 when Kirk was shot – meaning that his brain may not have fully developed to regulate emotions and control his impulses. 

It may also help his defense that he had no criminal record or history of violence and was a strong student who mowed lawns and otherwise helped his elderly neighbors.

Robinson’s relationship with his family, who generally have stood by him since his arrest, could also aid his case.

His legal team will likely use the fact that he confessed to his father as a sign of moral responsibility, according to experts. 

They could also use his conflict with family members over his liberal politics and alleged romantic relationship with Twiggs – who apparently was transitioning from male to female around the time of Kirk’s assassination – as evidence of Robinson’s emotional turmoil, isolation or psychological strain.

His apparent view of Kirk as a hateful homophobe, and what may have been his desire to avenge hate against trans people like Twiggs, could be wildcards in his defense team’s strategy to keep him alive.

‘They could frame it as he didn’t actually kill with hate in his heart but killed to eradicate hate,’ Lain said.

Kirk ‘was a pretty hateful dude, objectively speaking,’ Blume agreed. ‘He hasn’t been portrayed that way by the media, who make him sound like the second coming of Jesus. But he was really kind of a bully who picked on young, impressionable college kids.’

Blume added that ‘attacking the victim is not generally a good mitigation strategy’ and would be the best tactic for Robinson – especially in conservative Utah.

Another wildcard could be Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, who said at Kirk’s memorial service that she forgives Robinson.

‘My husband, he wanted to save young men just like the one who took his life,’ she said during the memorial, adding, ‘The answer to hate is not hate.’

She later said in a Fox News interview that she feared that taking an eye-for-an-eye stance against Robinson would keep her ‘from being in heaven, from being with Charlie’.

‘I do not want this man's blood on my ledger when I stand before the Lord. I want the government to decide,’ she said at the time.

Her statements, experts say, could either inspire jurors to respect her apparent wishes or, conversely, to step in and avenge her husband's death for her by meting out the death penalty.

Although juries weigh victims’ statements and wishes before sentencing, some experts said their input matters more when they want the death penalty than when they don’t.

‘When the victims aren’t pushing strongly for a death sentence, they tend to get marginalized,’ Lain said.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the death penalty should be reserved only for what it calls ‘the worst of the worst’ offenders. 

Jurors have testified in appeals that they wouldn’t have voted for a death sentence if they had known what kind of demons defendants faced earlier in their lives, causing some courts to reverse death sentences in cases where defense teams didn’t do or present mitigation research.

‘It’s far better for everyone, and less expensive, to do the digging at the front end than to have to go through decades of litigation,’ Vartkessian said. 

‘My hope is that everyone understands this process, this work of humanizing someone the prosecution is trying to present as a monster, it takes a lot of time.’