Katie Carter is a fact investigator, mitigation specialist, and sentencing-filmmaker. A native of Louisiana, Katie was a public defender investigator in New Orleans for 13 years. She has aided in the defense of clients facing everything from marijuana possession to the death penalty in her role as investigator and mitigator, always with an eye for empathy-building. Some of her most creative and effective work has evolved into short documentary film on her client’s lives made for the purpose of sentencing advocacy. Katie believes that when we collectively focus on the conditions that were created to allow a person to fall, we begin to reframe traditional, binary models of guilt vs. innocence and good vs. bad. Rather than rely on a law enforcement-created narrative, her films ask the court to consider crime in its context while affording accused persons the dignity of their own story as they have lived it.