Narrative Change

"An innovative study of narrative construction in capital defense cases from management professor and death penalty expert. Since 1976, Texas has accounted for more than a third of the nation's 1,400 executions. In cases where the prosecutor seeks the death penalty in Texas, the defendant is sentenced to death 90 percent of the time. In West Texas in 2008, that rate was 98 percent. That's when the newly formed Regional Public Defenders Office for Capital Cases approached management professor Hans Hansen to drastically rethink their strategic approach to death penalty cases. The result? Only one of the eighty criminals charged with the death penalty the team has defended since its inception has been sentenced to death. Hansen conducted a six-year ongoing ethnographic management investigation into how these cases are defended, and how it could be done better. Through narrative construction, a method by which participants produce a narrative to make sense of their organizational context and strategically guide action and decision-making, Hansen and the RPDO identified key flaws in traditional approaches to defending capital cases and set about fixing them. For instance, rather than re